68 - Love in the air

Excerpt from the Pages of Arko Special Edition Muunas 2, 50^th P.A., “Kallijas and Minis Imperator”:

Moments after he announced the results, a very emotional Shefen-kas said, “I can’t tell you how good I feel—not just because those whom I was supporting won—but to see this happen, an Arkan Imperator chosen by vote. It’s been my dearest dream. Listen to them: that’s the power that Kurkas and his ilk took away from them. They have it back and they know it and they love it, and there is so much love in the air, it’s my dearest dream come true.”

Yelling over the din of the crowd in the square, the outgoing Imperator confessed to having had doubts. “There were plenty of times when I was thinking, this is never going to come to fruition; I don’t know how to explain to Arkans, they’re too set in their ways, they’re too rejecting of ours, they think this is a Yeoli thing, an un-Arkan thing. But it’s as I’ve always said, it’s a human thing; the vote is just the vote, there’s nothing strange about it, it’s simply taking a count of everyone’s opinion, and everyone has opinions. I will take my leave of Arko feeling I’ve left it in safe hands: the hands of its own people, whether they’re Aitzas or okas, man or woman, rich or poor—whoever.”

†

After I made the official announcement, and all the beacon-lights converged on Kallijas’s and Minis’s flag, lighting it bright as day against night, there was no more to do but celebrate.

And make speeches, of course. Mil, Kin and Adamas all spoke their concession, “I bow to the will of the people of Arko and will be loyalty to the rightful Imperators Elect Kallijas Itrean and Minis Aan,” and so forth.

Kallijas had not really planned a speech, even in the last bead or so when it had been apparent he’d win, which was perhaps for the better, as it would force him to speak from his heart as he had to Toras’s army at Anoseth. So he did, thanking profusely all who had supported and worked for him and Minis, naming every name that he knew.

Then he said, “Arko, you have been first in my heart from the time I knew I had a heart to give. I will defend your rights to the last breath I have, should you ask it of me. I thank you all for your vote and your voice. I love you all.” And then he started them chanting, Arko, Arko, Arko, the chant in which everyone could join as one.

Minis spoke longer, and there was more about their plans in it. “Arko was offered the choice between the old way and the new,” he said, “and it has made its choice clear.” He got the people chanting again; then he put his hands to his temples in the prayer-gesture, and Kallijas did it too, and that got quiet, with the whole crowd doing it, and then they led them in a prayer.

With the Rising of the Sun
With the Rising of the Moon.
Sacred Ten, Gods of Arko,
Raise us too, into the Light.

As they led the orchestra and the crowd in singing, I slipped away to the writers. They were in love with me, it seemed, all with me and wanting to know my heart; they even asked me if I’d come back again, if their elected Imperators proved unworthy somehow (to which I answered, as I must, “No, because Arko and Yeola-e will be separate nations again.”)

Then someone was pulling at my arm: Tawaen. We had more family than just Inensa now on the roof; Niku and Vriah and Roshten, Skorsas, Kallijas’s parents and brother as well as little Kall, Gannara as Minis’ brother in spirit, and there was First Amitzas, Minis’ grandfather. Who the white-blond boy of seven or so standing close to Minis was, though, I had no idea. Gannara gave him a big hug, so he was no stranger.

No time to ask now: Tawaen was screaming in his high voice, the only way he could make me hear him. “Dad! You’ve got to speak! Listen, they want you!” I realized what the crowd was chanting: “She-fen-kas!”

“What? Minis, Kall? This is your moment, I don’t want to take away from it!” They both came striding towards me, with looks on their faces that said, “They want him? Semana kra, they will have him.” I went peacefully. Of course I didn’t have anything planned either; I’d been intending to do a proper farewell address at the end of the transition when I was not wearing the seals and would leave the next day.

So I spoke from the heart, and while it seemed fumble-tongued at the time, it looked good enough when I read it back quoted. It was about what semana kra means; if the crowd wants me to speak, I speak, if Arko wants me as Imperator, I’m Imperator, if it wants Minis and Kallijas as Imperator, they are Imperator. I told them how I had always wanted them to know what that means, to live it and to enact it, and now that they were, I would leave Arko happy, loving them all.

Now I understood why I was not taking away Kallijas’s and Minis’s moment to say this; this was Arko’s moment, not theirs, and it was I who had given it to them.

I heard them call back to me that they loved me too, and someone close to the presentation platform bellowed, “Kallijas! Show him how much we love him!”

Kall held up his hands for quiet, and when he got as much as he would get, he said, “I hear a resolution put forward: that I demonstrate to the outgoing Imperator directly the feeling Arko has—” His voice was lost in a roar of acclamation. He held up his arms again, and asked who was opposed; there was only a trace of noise.

So he took off his gloves—as Imperator Elect, he could now—took my face between his naked hands and bent me backwards in a more passionate kiss than I thought him capable of in front of fifty thousand Arkans. As he did, the cheer rose so loud I thought it would break my ears. “Feel better about politics?” I asked him, when he allowed me the use of my tongue again.

It becomes a blur after that; there was wine on the roof and I’d started partaking of it; Kallijas took me down into the Imperial bedchamber and we made love until we were both seeing stars; then it was the parties, the best one at Mil Torii Itzan’s. But I had to do one thing before I let myself be carried into pure revelry.

Minis forestalled me, bringing the boy up to introduce him. “Chevenga: my younger brother, Ilesias. In full, Ilesias Tathanas Kurkas Joras Aan. I hope you’ll forgive me for keeping what happened to him secret from you… I placed him with my tutor Ailadas, and the idea was that if I lost and came to grief, he’d have a peaceful and non-political life under an assumed name. I knew you are too open and honest to not reveal him somehow if I told you.”

Little Ilesias, then hardly more than a baby, had been spirited out of the city with Minis just before the Sack; then when Minis had won free he’d taken him too, unwilling to leave him in the hands of the Mahid. The whole touchy and difficult escape they’d done with a five-year-old child along. When they’d returned to Arko and Minis had settled Ailadas in a house of his own, Ilesias had started living there too.

“Of course I forgive you,” I said. I saw Kurkas in Ilesias as I could see him in Minis; more so, even, in the squarer cheekbones. Inensa not at all; his mother had been a different Mahid concubine. She had been one of those who’d taken her dagger to herself when we’d taken the Marble Palace, something I would have to offer to make peace with Ilesias for, when he was old enough.

†

I think I must have been drunk already, or else it was the joy of the crowd palsying my mind, because when Skorsas proposed I go to Mil Torii Itzan’s party dressed as I would have when I’d been a ring-fighter, I agreed. I even took Chirel, and had it peace-bonded. The peace-token, emblazoned with the Itzan sigil and the date, I still have among my mementos.

It was a fine party, best for Kallijas. He went bare-handed; since there had never before been an Imperator Elect, there is no insignia for one, and so I suggested to him, “Make it naked hands, ungloved so as to prepare to receive the Seals.” I was only half-serious, but, to my surprise, he did.

At one point, someone asked Kallijas and I to re-enact the duel, which we did with long-stemmed roses for swords and canapé platters for shields. We did the last exchange at half-speed, then at quarter-speed when someone complained that they couldn’t see it because it was too fast, then again at close to full speed when someone else said it didn’t look that hard.

In the moment of silence afterwards, a clear young female voice said, loudly enough for everyone to hear, “If you think that’s easy, you try it.”

The men laughed dismissively in the way Arkan men do when women speak up on subjects on which they are supposed to be ignorant. A space seemed to clear, and a slender young woman, perhaps nineteen or twenty, with a face that was good to look at and honest at once, stood cringing and wide-eyed with her gloved hands over her mouth. Near her was an older man—her father, as I could see from the resemblance right away—glaring at her, then joining in with the other men in an attempt to laugh it off. I’d weapon-sensed a steel-loaded folding fan in the crowd; she was the one carrying it. She had a pair of hair-pins that were steel rather than gold, too.

“Laugh you may,” Kallijas said, “but Serina Si Rusa has a point.” Either he’d heard her announced—Mil himself declaimed each of the guests’ names as they entered—or knew the family. The father, who was very Aitzas, looked deeply relieved.

Intrigued with her, I conversed with her, finding out that she’d had some war-training, mostly by pestering first her older brother, then her younger brother’s war-teachers. She spoke very admiringly of Kall, but was shy of him, of course, and I knew he would be of her, so I introduced them, then got the three of us out to a private garden.

I cadged her war-story out of her: she’d been sent with the other women of the family out of the city, but had gone back to defend the house as we’d approached, setting up to hold it with her little brother, and when her father had come back from Finpollendias, his commander having surrendered to us, he’d just silently handed her a sword. Of course I did not ask whether she’d killed anyone in my own army, as that would oblige her to tell me.

Then, as a friend does, I left them alone, letting her father know and making sure he was agreeable to that. Kallijas and Laisa, for that was her given name, spent a long time in the garden, and I tried to feel no jealousy at all, to see the look on his face when he came out, and how long it lasted.





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