133 - The trial of the street and the dinner-table

There are two ways to approach any argument: to win or reconcile, to convince one way or the other entirely, or to compromise. Because of that, the court system of Yeola-e is bipartite.

In the matter of so-and-so’s cow knocked over so-and-so’s fence, or a broken four wrangling over the fate of children, or even petty thievery, the tradition is reconciliation, and so the judge strives to have the wrongdoer make amends and the wronged forgive, or, where fault is not so one-sided, both parties understand the other’s view.

There is generally much chiravesa, and usually it all with everyone flinging their arms around each other tearfully. This is how it goes in virtually every case in the small towns and villages, and nine out of ten even in the larger cities. You can contract an advocate if you want, but it’s frowned upon.

In a matter such as one city suing another, negligence in war, constitutional disputes or breaches of the Statute semanakraseyeni, the trial will be more adversarial, with more attention paid to minutiae of fact, though judges will strive for the best sort of reconciliation they can in the end.

When the Office of Prosecution is the accuser, on behalf of the people, the accused may (and is unwise not to) get an advocate, either the public defender whose turn it is, who is paid out of the public purse, or another advocate chosen by the accused, who must then pay.

My case, of course, was the latter sort. I didn’t doubt that Skorsas would pay for the priciest advocate in the land, or the ten priciest if it would make a difference, but I would have been happy with the defender whose turn it was, though I didn’t know him. But I had more friends in the legal wing than I knew.

Even as Niku and Skorsas were still pacing back and forth ranting against my people in reaction to the news, runners came up with letters from eight different defenders, all offering to do it for free, and half of them definitely were not looking to make their name on a famous case, because they did not need to. The one I was most familiar with, having watched trials as part of my education, including two of hers, was Chosaiya Ninganen, so I chose her.

Sweet bliss had faded into harder-edged reality overnight, so the next morning when I went down to her office in Terera, my innards were in knots. Last time, after I’d come home from Arko, had been more straightforward: I’d turned myself in for killing Yeolis in the ring, and so no one doubted my honesty for a moment, and I could easily argue that I’d been compelled to do it, since I had. This time the crime had been by my free will, and I’d been caught.

Chosaiya was another person I knew just from passing in the corridors. She was around fifty, wore an understated long dark tunic and her auburn hair in a tight bun as is typical in the legal wing, and was one of those people who exudes confidence with every move and expression, whether it’s pulling the chair out for you or setting your mind to rest on some sticky aspect of your case. I even saw her scratch the back of her hand confidently, once. Her office smelled deeply of book-leather.

When we’d clasped hands and sat down, she said, “I can tell you, they’re squirming at the prosecutors’ office right now. They’ll give it to the youngest one who looks credible for a semanakraseyeni case, because none of them want to do it. Since your secret came out, everyone knows you broke the law, and we’ve all been looking the other way because it turned out so well in the end. Then you go and do this… you know there’s such a thing as being too honest, Fourth Chevenga? I have people in this office all the time, weeping into their tea, because they were. Or maybe I should put it this way, though it’s beyond me how after all that time in Arko you cannot know: never let yourself be questioned under truth-drug by someone who’s out to destroy you.”

I thought I’d had it well thought out. She made me feel like an apprentice general again. Like all advocates’ clients, I guess, I was feeling too much.

“Let’s look at exactly what is at stake here,” she said. “Not whether you’re guilty; you are. Not whether you’ll be punished; you will—justice must be seen to be done. Probably not even how much; the judges’ll want to give you such a fast and light slap on the wrist that you barely feel the sting and everyone forgets, and if we give them a good enough argument and play hard on your abilities and accomplishments and overriding considerations, they’ll have justification for that. That they’ve scheduled our first appearance for the day after tomorrow shows how fast they want to get it done… you recall that anything under the Statute semanakraseyeni is tried before Assembly also?” I signed chalk. “So that’s where we’ll be and that means Assembly has moved other business to accommodate us.

“Now you can also be impeached; the judges have the power to do it as part of the sentence, and if they forbear, Assembly will still debate and take a vote—it’s not required but it’s always done by convention—and it can even be put to a national vote, if both sides agree, if the judges and Assembly agree, or if one side and Assembly agrees. The question is whether the judges or Assembly will consider you too tainted to go on. That is, assuming that you want to remain semanakraseye…? If you don’t, there’s not much to worry about at all.”

“I do.” Those were the words that came to my lips; even as they did, I remembered how Surya and I had put off my facing this question in Arko after I’d flung off the seals and signet. We had not yet picked it up again. Was he thinking it would solve itself? Or that I could not bear to face it, yet? If the latter, this was going to be an interesting test.

“I thought so,” she said. “Well, it’s as I say, I think the judges will not be inclined to impeach you. Assembly has its ears much more on the feelings of the people, and the debate will take time. What that means, depending on how long it goes, is you don’t have to win the trial of the court so much as the trial of the street and the dinner-table.”

I took a deep breath. “I was once confident I was loved, on the street and around the dinner table.”

“Oh, Chevenga!” she said, in a don’t-be-ridiculous tone. “You still are! What you’ve done for Yeola-e won’t be forgotten for a thousand years, let alone in our lifetimes. But you can love someone for what he has done, and still think he is no longer capable.”

I knew she’d discerned exactly what was at stake, by the surge of sickness I felt.

“So let’s do a little chiravesa: you and I are typical Yeolis, on our street or around our dinner-table, discussing state affairs. What do we know about Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e?” I took another sip of tea, hoping its heat would soothe my stomach. I noticed it had a touch of ginger in it; was I not the only client of hers that had such trouble, or had she noticed it just with me?

“He is our child-prodigy warrior-general who did the impossible, bringing us back from all-but-conquest, and then taking us to conquest… perhaps we thought he was a bit power-mad as Imperator in Arko, but not after he kept trying to give Arko the vote and finally succeeded by getting himself impeached,” she said. “We understood what he was doing. We know he was tortured in Arko, but had good healing. We know that he’s got something of a bent towards killing himself… he dived out of a window of the Marble Palace in remorse for sacking Arko, and we’ve heard a few other things. Brilliance and madness are only a shade apart, yes?”

“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “Which of the two I wouldn’t know about, you can choose.” I was sipping my tea to try to keep my gorge down.

“Point is, a lot of people think it. So then we find out that all his life, Chevenga’s been living thinking he must, he should, die in the flower of life. All-Spirit, we think—”

She and I said it as one. “That explains so much!”

“—but we also think—and you’ll have to trust me here, Chevenga, because, living with this on the inside, you cannot see how it looks from the outside. We also think, because most people do when they see something like this, ‘But that’s crazy!’ And Chevenga is indeed working with a psyche-healer, taking a medical leave and having his mental state studied, by a committee of Assembly, because we don’t just need, but want, to understand.

“We find out also that he is planning to go asa kraiya—which some of us understand but others do not. How can a sane person so entirely renounce that which defines him, and which saved us all? And what if someone else attacks us? We hear he was brought to court in restraints to have his freedom taken away, after trying to kill himself, and it had something to do with his stream-test. Is his mind falling apart?

“Now finally, it’s this—charged for withholding relevant information from the people, because he didn’t tell Assembly he’d be semanakraseye for ten years at the most. That’s not a recent thing, can’t be attributed to overwork or strain or Arkan torture or whatever. ‘Yes, we love him,’ we’re thinking. ‘For what he did, Yeola-e will always love him. But he decided to lie to all of us when he was only…” She had the Committee transcript on her desk, and skimmed down it. “Thirteen. When it comes down to it… can we truly trust him?’

I let my face fall into my hands. Tears stung in my eyes but I held them back, for one of those absurd reasons your mind grabs onto when it is in the grip of anguish; my tea-cup was right underneath, and it would be too much like what she’d said about people in her office who’d been too honest.

“Or is Chevenga the great person with the fatal flaw, which, in the end, combined with the toll taken on him by everything he has done and suffered, ruins him for his work? That’s a very powerful story, a tragedy and a parable in one. Yeolis love it. If the presses take it up, and you know how they ape each other, you’re done.”

I took a deep breath, and then another, trying to keep any quivering out of them and not entirely succeeding. I couldn’t speak.

What does the semanakraseyesin mean to me? The Surya-in-me, well-trained now, knew it was required that I ask this of myself. What was in the tears I was half-mastering?

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