66 - The mother stone

All through the campaign, we had discerned as best we could whether favour for Minis and Kallijas would be stronger in the City Itself or out. One in ten citizens of the Empire, roughly, live within the City, and as well the rest of the Empire very much takes its marching orders on what to think from the City, for all people in Marsae or Fispur or Anoseth would be loathe to admit it.

So it had always mattered, but suddenly it mattered a great deal more, and on the Marble Palace roof there was talk about virtually nothing else.

Kallijas was from the City, of course, and so could count on much favour there; he was also much loved in Kurkania from his years of fighting there. But people knew they were voting only for two years of him.

Minis’ childish reputation as a hellion he’d made in the City, of course, and it was hard to measure how much he’d succeeded in countering it since. He’d won favour by distancing himself from his father by having spurned his father’s plans for him, leaving the Mahid and revealing himself to me so as to prevent future civil war. The Pages had cautiously recommended him; but of course he wrote for them, and everyone knew that now. The final factor was the Miksas tract, of course, whose effect could clearly be delineated as ending at the Rim. How much did it account for Minis and Kall losing in the City? A great deal, we were now hoping.

Then there was my part, since Kall and Minis not only had my recommendation but were both known to see eye-to-eye with me politically and as very close to me. At least for this there was a record to derive some clue from, the vote returns from my and then Artira’s impeachment votes.

In both, I’d done better in the west, where there were fewer kin of solas who died fighting me, and done worst in the City. For all enough city Arkans to jam the square had come out once to celebrate my return and again to affirm with candles their wishes for long life, those who would never vote for me or anything I supported because the blood of those they had loved was on my hands were very many too.

When it came to the new ways I had brought to Arko, which Kall and Minis had sworn to continue and Adamas to reverse, there was a clear difference in favour not so much between the City Itself and the rest of the Empire but between city and country in general. The larger the town, the more it leaned chalk. Here, we’d been counting on Arko the City to carry the banner. Had Miksas’s story alone dashed that, persuading people to vote from fear than from reason, as it is all too easy to do? We had to hope so, now.

Twilight turned to full dark, and the crowd’s songs and chants grew more intense as the flags crept upwards. The red-silver began gaining on the green; when Minis came back from his swim he was not ahead, but he was closer, and he took heart from that. Still, he was twitchy as a purebred horse. He half-approached me, then turned away, then did it again, as if he wanted to tell me something but was afraid. The third time I beckoned him over and asked him, “What is it?”

“I was thinking…” He cast his eyes downward, and fidgeted with his feet. “Is it possible… may we… bring my mother up here?”

“Is that all? Of course, Minis.”

“Under guard, of course,” he said hastily. “She might not be safe, don’t go anywhere near her, all right?”

“What, she’s going to assassinate me, just as I’m about to give it up, with her bare hands, from between two guards? I didn’t think the Mahid trained their women that well.”

He sighed. “Of course not, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to suggest anything…” I sent Krero and First Amitzas for her, and Minis rushed away with them. Now and then, since she’d been brought to the dungeon, he’d visited her, but clearly he hadn’t already asked if she wanted to come up tonight, and so had to now.

He was back first; she was coming, but had requested use of a bath and boudoir in the Mahid section to make herself presentable, first, which Amitzas and Krero had granted.

“You’re going to introduce us, I hope,” I said to Minis. “Or do you think she’d be comfortable with being introduced to an Imperator, at least for a bead or two more, to whom she hasn’t sworn?”

“My… mother?” He stared at me. “I… well, I’d love that. Her… I don’t know. Muunas… I feel completely wrung out, and we still have our speeches to do.” He glanced at the flags, and took a deep breath.

“You’re gaining steadily,” I said. “If that continues, you’ll have it. Think of that.” By the time Inensa came onto the roof, the flags were dead even, and his face was brightening.

Between two guards, one Yeoli and one Arkan, came a woman who was Mahid from head to toe, her silken gown and gloves onyxine, a square silver brooch precisely placed beneath the centre of her high collar, the masses of her white-blond hair impeccably braided and bound. She walked spear-straight and with chin high, her hands folded stiffly together at her waist. In what must be a hidden pocket in the palm of her shield-hand glove she held a Mahid killing-needle.

He went scurrying to greet her, and to bring her to me. It’s common knowledge I have weapon-sense now; does she not know? Of course she’d gone straight from the woods to the dungeon, and she was an Arkan woman, required by tradition to know nothing of war. Yet she knows enough to have that... As one invariably does, I looked for the resemblance. Minis’s gracile build was hers, I saw, as well as the lines of brow and nose. She was perhaps in her mid-thirties.

As Minis introduced us, she regarded me with the stonily impassive Mahid face. “I’m pleased to meet you,” I said, and extended my hand, ready to whip it away if I had to. She didn’t extend hers.

“Fourth Shefen-kas.” She spoke utterly without emotion, and equal-to-equal. “I am not sure how to answer you. I cannot acknowledge you the way my son wishes.”

“You need not,” I said. “You, he and I have our agreement.”

“I am completely without direction and guide and am unsure what is correct,” she said. Meaning no one’s giving her orders, I thought; there is no Imperator she recognizes and she doesn’t even have a man to rule her. At least the sharp diction Mahid use made her audible over the crowd. “I do know that I am able to acknowledge my own child and for that I have you to thank. Thank you.”

“You are more than welcome.” I glanced at the flags. Was I imagining it, or was the red-silver a hair higher?

“How…” she trailed off to silence.

“How…?”

“How can you bear this… uncertainty?” She lifted her chin, towards the flags. “Never knowing who will be in control?

“But I always know who is in control,” I said. “The people.”

“A mob cannot pilot a ship or direct a horse. How can the mass of them direct a country?”

“They can’t, always. So they choose someone, as Arko has now. I’m used to the mob; born and bred, you know.”

“So I understand. Though it still seems very messy and disorganized to me.”

“The Yeoli mob actually does direct things, to a great degree. It takes a great deal of arranging and organizing, but we’ve been doing it a long time—a millennium and a half—so we have the methods well-refined.”

“My son tells me that I might understand you if I think of you as your people’s sole Mahid. First Amitzas confirms this thinking.”

I couldn’t help but smile. “There is more truth to that than many Yeolis would like to admit,” I said. “Ultimate and unquestioning loyalty: exactly the same. The sacrifice of my life if I am asked to, that too; it’s woven into all the customs. There are very strict laws governing what I do, and thoughts considered correct and incorrect. We even have our forms of correction, albeit less torturous.”

“I’ve even heard that when you are not in the Imperial white-and-gold, you have a penchant for onyxine.” Had she been talking to Surya?

“I’ve been known to. Something I have always wanted to say to you, Inensa, and I hope the case is extreme enough that I may be forgiven for speaking ill of the dead: for having been married to Second Amitzas Mahid, you have my sympathy.” Only after the words were out of my mouth did it occur to me that she might not yet have been told he was dead.

“Rest he in Celestialis,” she said tightly. Her face gave no clue at all, but Minis’s, ever naked, hadn’t changed either, so it seemed she’d known. “I thank you for your sympathy.” Whether it was from true gratitude or pure formality, I couldn’t tell.

“He touched all three of our lives, didn’t he?” I said. “Mine less than either of yours, and yet still significantly.”

“How far do you intend to take your vengeance against him?” Inensa asked me, looking me straight in the eyes as an Arkan woman will rarely do.

“I’m done. He’s dead. Why?”

“I carry his child in my body.”

Now Minis’s face changed; he stared at her, amazed. “M-m-mother… you didn’t tell me that!”

“I have no intention of harming his, and your, child,” I said. But she was going to accept execution rather than swearing; maybe this is why he was able to talk her into holding off deciding…? Right then there was a swelling in the crowd noise, and it changed, the Kallijas-Minis chants surging. I looked up; the flags had just been raised again. The red-silver was clearly higher than the green.

“I thank you, Shefen-kas. It will be my son’s decision whether this child will be the beginning of his own Mahid, if the lead he now has sustains until the end.” Minis stood frozen, speechless; I could see him thinking, brother… or sister... “In the meantime, Minis: I recommend that you never acquire a taste for administering Mahid’s Obedience to your bed partners.” That didn’t help; already pale, his face lost even more blood, and he looked as if he was about to throw up. The part of me that remembered, in my bones, the Mahid drug whose only effect is pure pain went internally weak as well. How often did he... I took a deep breath. He was dead; she was free.

“It may not be only the Imperator who decides what the existing Mahid will do, or whether there will be a new line,” I said. “There’s Assembly, now, too. My thought is that the Mahid should be what has always been best about them, and leave behind what was worst.”

She looked at me with a trace of an arching of her brow, if I wasn’t imagining it. “And what were we, other than a weapon of the Imperator’s terror? Our loyalty was always what was best about us, in my opinion.”

“I agree. Insofar as you are loyal to something that is good, it’s a virtue.”

“So you, who believe so firmly in the freedom of the mob as exercised through the vote, do not think that people who make themselves a blank page for a ruler to write upon freely can be dangerous?” An Arkan woman is debating me, I thought. I remembered thinking she must be intelligent, because Minis had to have got it from somewhere.

“They are a reflection only of him. They give up their own choices. Insofar as he is dangerous, they are dangerous. As I was, Yeoli Mahid that I am; I was the sword in my own people’s hand, with as little choice, against Arko.”

“That’s not what I understand,” she said drily. “Some say it was entirely your choice, and they followed you.” I’m not going to live down being made to answer that question, I thought, even if Surya manages to make me live to two hundred. “Yet… if the Imperator becomes the reflection of his people, the Mahid could become a much larger reflection as well.”

“Yes,” I said. “May the Mahid be that.” She blinked, and her mouth made a momentary twitch of a smile before becoming stone again. “Another thing I have wanted to tell you: I am proud of your son.” Was I imagining it, or was there a softening in her eyes?

“Minis,” she said, and I thought I heard her voice soften too, “has very little of the darkness seeded in him, and I appreciate the lightness he radiates. I am also pleased you have seen this in him.” I cast a glance at him; he looked as if he’d just been cold-cocked by a God.

“It was obvious to me when he was ten,” I said.

From somewhere within her gown, Inensa drew out a thumbnail-sized yellow diamond, cut in the round, many-facetted style that throws the most sparkles, on a golden chain. I heard Minis gasp. She slung it around her neck, carefully arranging her hair over it, while he stared, his mouth hanging open.

I realized: it was the mother-stone he had given her. Arkan boys usually gift their mothers with one at first threshold; thinking ‘better late than never,’ he’d given it to her the day after she’d been locked in the dungeon. Now more than ever, she seemed to be thinking, when the mother’s gushy smile most wants to spread over my face, I must school it. Her face remained stone.




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