70 - No work to do except this

As many Arkans jammed themselves into the square and the streets and roofs around for my farewell speech as had for the election count, to my surprise, and again showed me love in chants and songs and yelled blessings, and would not let me go until I’d gone down among them, putting more grey hairs on Krero’s long-suffering head.

I’d called off all work with Surya during the transition, but he was sticking fairly close to me even as he arranged his own move. “It still bewilders me,” I said to him as I was making ready for bed that night—we’d go tomorrow—“how much they love me, after what I did to them.” My body was ringing from head to foot with the feeling of the crowd.

“There is something I have not told you, as I doubted you would credit it,” he said, after a quick once-over of my aura, “but I’ll tell you now. By nature you are a healer.”

I stared at him, then burst out laughing, for all I tried not to. “You’re right—I don’t credit it for a moment.” I ran a finger over the callus on my sword-hand, under his nose. “I didn’t get this handling a scalpel. Healer, feh. Has my madness spread to you?”

“You are, and they see that, and they are grateful; that’s why they love you.”

“You know, you’ve done absolutely nothing to answer my bafflement, Surya. You’re being no help at all.”

“Well, let’s take a full accounting,” he said. “They occupied us, killed us, raped us, enslaved us, mutilated us, sacked scores of our cities, razed one. And none of that was much kept secret from the people of Arko. To you, they did the worst that a person could have done to him, short of death. You conquered them and sacked their capital, but then you gave them the vote, and justice, and freedom from tyranny.”

“I hear enough complaints about that,” I said. Many Yeolis, I am ashamed to have found, are of a more vengeful cast of mind than I am.

“Then why do you doubt, that your calling is to transform for the better? Or, in fewer words, to be a healer?”

I had no answer to that but to fling a handy cushion at him, which I did. He just laughed and said, “Wait. It will come much clearer in time.”

It was after the noon observance that I spoke. The verdict and sentences for the fourteen hawks came that afternoon: guilty, and exile without safe-conduct as well as confiscation of all their Arkan property, for all fourteen of them. They wouldn’t even be able to bequeath any of what they had stolen.

Just like in Yeola-e, an armed crowd waited on the courthouse steps. Each of the hawks had had a small army of hired thugs for his or her own protection, but with their employers now legally broke, the thugs apparently saw no hope of further pay and so were nowhere to be seen.

I went to an outside window at second bead, when I knew the condemned would be sent out, and heard the roar and the screams drowned out by it. The sight of a trickling waterfall of blood flowing over the lip of a pristine white marble stair came to my mind, against my will. A moment of listening was enough; I went back inside.

The next morning broke bright and warm, the thermals forming fast. In a flock of wings, I leapt off the Rim with Niku and rose shining into an eye-burning blue sky. Below, the first sun had caught the gold and white and russet-tiled towers of Arko, turning them brilliant against the dark blue-grey of the quiet streets below, and igniting the dew-laden tops of the trees in the woods into green flame. I wrapped my arms around Niku and nuzzled my face between her shoulder-blades. It’s not as if I’m never going to be back in my life, I told myself.

We had decided to be easier on ourselves and take the three-day way, with Niku flying all night and me sleeping with my head on her shoulder. I did not rest during the days, though; knowing that Assembly would want a report on the relinquishment and transition, I wrote it in the air, so I’d be finished with everything once I got home.

I had more time than I thought; a line of storms coming in over Thara-e kept us grounded there on the third day. We finally landed on the Hearthstone Independent roof on the night of the fourth.

Next morning I put on the demarchic shirt and went down to Assembly, Niku jumping me by wing again over a clutch of hailing writers. An errant up-valley gust took us off-course, landing us on the courthouse steps instead of the main Assembly Palace entrance, and I saw the cracks between the stones were faintly blackened over a patch in the centre. The last traces of Sharaina Anina’s blood. It hurt, I realized, to have seen both my peoples’ love for me expressed so.

I went into Assembly and the Servants stood to applaud when I took my place, whether from happiness to see me or reward for what I had done in Arko or something else, I was not sure. I asked to recuse myself from presiding so as to speak in my own right, and was granted, the crystal handed to the Adakri.

I presented the report, confessing it was still in my Athali scrawl and must be transcribed to classic. “Having done that,” I said, “unless there is further work asked of me with respect to Arkan matters, I request, as was discussed when I was last in Assembly, that Assembly grant me a half-year leave of absence for medical reasons.”

They chalked it unanimously, with little discussion, and then Lanai Kesila, Servant of Issolai, whom the Chevengani Mental State Assessment Committee had chosen as its president, stood to say for the record that the Committee would commence work today, etesora 23, so that its season-from-now deadline would be atakina 23. I relinquished the signet to the Adakri, and went back up to the Independent.

Kaninjer greeted me at the door. “Into bed,” he said. “Three days bed-rest, then we see how you are and maybe it will be more, that’s an order, no bucking.”

I stared at him stunned. I wasn’t sick; I was sure of that. He took advantage of my silence like a warrior an opening. “Chivinga… take a deep breath. You are standing… relax every muscle you have that is not required for standing. Now go into yourself… become aware of your body, feeling it everywhere, high and low, inside and out, in each part and as a whole. Feel how it truly feels. And tell me.”

I’d been getting up at dawn and going past midnight for the last month at least, and it was only three-quarters of a moon past the solstice, so dawn was early. Turning my attention inside myself as he asked, I suddenly felt it, like a weight on every joint and muscle. In the distance within my bones was an ominous echo of the feeling I’d had when I’d collapsed at Chinisinal.

“Dead on my feet,” I said. “But I—”

“Have so much to do, you’re going to say; that’s what you always say. But you don’t.”

I took another deep breath. If I put my feet up for a month, or three, did nothing but laze and swim and hang in the sky cuddling Niku, I would be leaving nothing undone, letting no one down, jeopardizing no nation’s wellbeing. Now I felt the echoes of the black meaninglessness that had sapped my will to live to nothing after I’d been impeached; but since I’d made peace with that, they were distant.

So I said, “I hear and obey,” went to the garderobe and then stripped and lay down in the great bed. I was gone in a breath or two and stayed that way for the rest of the day, and indeed the next two, getting up only for the garderobe and to stretch my legs or to laze in the pool now and then, as Skorsas had me served every meal in bed.

On the way to the garderobe in my chambers in the Hearthstone there is an Arkan-glass mirror—Skorsas liked to stand me in front of it—that I stopped myself short in front of, on a whim, before I first lay down. The exhaustion-peaked face under the scruffy shock of overlong black curls stared back at me balefully, somehow like a stranger’s.

It’s true, I have no work to do or burden to bear or challenge to face, I thought, feeling the beginning of trembling on the inside, since I was too tired to tremble on the outside. Except this.




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