161 - An unhealed wound in your soul

I lay back on Surya’s table, my eyes absently following the patterns on the mandala-cloth hung on the ceiling, his taking on the aura-seeing gaze. This was two days later. My mind was full of the Games, running over some of the game-battles I had fought, and some of the conversations.

How do I redeem myself for Kyirya, and make friends with him again? Or will it just take time? I considered approaches. Surya ran his eyes over my aura. “Who were those ten thousand people?” he said.

“Ten thousand people? What ten thousand people?”

“The ten thousand people you killed in one night.”

My tongue locked solid, my eyes freezing on one purple leaf-like design on the mandala. He went on looking at my aura, seeing, no doubt, the exact mechanism of my speechlessness. “They were Lakans,” I finally said. “Farmers… made warriors. It was in the Lakan war.”

“Hmm. How old were you?”

“Sixteen. It was when I was doing my apprenticeship as a general.”

“When was the last time you talked about it with anyone? Recounted it?”

“I…” I was surprised, in truth, by the answer I knew. “I never have. Since then. I wrote an account of it.”

“As part of the memoir, which no one has read, yes?”

“Aside from the Committee, yes.” Now that it was public knowledge that I’d written it, I’d had a lot of people ask to read it, and had said no to all except those on the Committee designated.

“And they haven’t talked to you about it because it’s not their mandate, or at least they don’t see that it is; you haven’t even mentioned it to someone else?”

“I imagine I must have mentioned it in passing, many times, though I can’t remember. And there was a psych-healer Hurai sent me to then; we talked about it a little. Well… not at all that mattered, in truth.”

“When was the last time you thought about it? Aside from when you wrote your account?”

I wasn’t even sure of that. For a time after, it had haunted me, but that had faded. It seemed I’d had something else to think about, every moment, ever since. “I’m not sure,” I said. “Years ago.”

“Do you think it left a mark on you?”

I found myself suddenly and sharply annoyed. “Why are you asking me? You’re the one who can see it, if it did… never mind, I know—you are testing me again. I suppose if you’re bringing it up, it did.” He stood in silence over me, waiting. “Are you asking me to recount it?” He signed chalk.

In a moment, I was trembling all over. “I reiterate my question,” he said. “Do you think it left a mark on you?” Eat shit, Surya Chaelaecha.

“All right, no, don’t recount it yet, let’s step back first.” He showed mercy so rarely, it was always a surprise. “In all your life, or, more exactly, your war career, what are the things that you have done that were… of a similar nature? I mean: death or harm dealt to people who were, for whatever reason, helpless.” Of course sometimes his mercy was out of the frying pan and into the fire.

“Not that many.”

He signed a firm charcoal. “No, no, no, Virani-e. The idea here is not for me to rake you, or you rake yourself, over the coals for them. The idea is to look for patterns.” He looked at my aura, again, squinting a little. “I am thinking there is one, and it’s very typical.”

“Really? Typical of clients of yours who’ve been personally responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands?”

He laughed. “My semanakraseye, don’t listen too much to the Enlightened Followers. You are human, and you do the same human things as anyone else. Just on a larger scale.”

I took a deep breath. “All right. The worst was the sack of Arko. I know, because I heard it a thousand times, many people feel they deserved it after what they did to Shakora and Tinga-e and Thara-e and Vae Arahi and so on and on and on. Arkans will tell me, they were expecting it. I regret it anyway. Revenge is no less cruelty for being revenge.

“There’s what I did, getting the last Arkans in Tinga-e to surrender… wait—does thumbing, or forcing the choice of death or thumbing, count?”

He considered for a bit, eyeing my aura, and then said, “No, not for our purposes. Because it’s a tradition; everyone expected it from you, and Yeolis would have done it if you hadn’t been there. Stick to what was uniquely yours.”

“A-e kras. In Tinga-e... we had about two thousand Arkans hemmed in on ships, who I wanted to convince to surrender. So I took a few hundred of the Arkans we’d captured onto the dock, and set up an Arkan bead clock. I had ten of them killed, started the clock running, and told the hold-outs that next bead I’d kill double that, and the bead after that, double again, until they surrendered. They did after four beads, so we defeated two thousand by killing three hundred and ten, which is a more merciful ratio than in most battles.”

“Again, Virani-e, you need not mount a defense, because I am not prosecuting. Tell me the next one.”

“It was after the Arkans did the raid on our infirmaries, near Kamalia. I had the prisoners impaled and quartered, which was not something I’d usually do. They’d not only raided infirmaries, but they’d killed Haians. Sixteen of them. You didn’t happen to be in an infirmary that night, did you?”

“No, though I came out of my tent on the alarm just in time to see Arkans charge into one. I remember how angry you were when you spoke the next morning, and how angry everyone got, when they found out they’d killed Haians. How many prisoners did you have executed that way?”

“I didn’t count; I’d guess about two-hundred and fifty. But in the greater scheme of things—”

“Virani-e, I’m not accusing. You know why you keep thinking I am?”

“I dread to find out.”

“Well, you have a bit of a reprieve. Tell me the next one.”

“That’s all. As I said, it’s not that many.”

“You keep thinking I’m accusing you because you are accusing yourself.”

“Well…” Of course I was. “Surya, who’s proud of that sort of thing?”

He studied my aura. “All right,” he said. “Which do you think left the most severe mark on you?”

That was easy. “The sack of Arko. The whole world knows it.”

“Recount it for me.”

Having left the army after Porfirias, he hadn’t been there. Just as well; I couldn’t imagine him taking part in the joy in pure destruction that is a sack. Probably he would have been one of the warriors who tried to hold the other warriors back from sacking, saying no sack order had been given.

I hadn’t seen it much myself, in fact; I’d flown with my best thousand over the ranged armies on Finpollendias and straight to the Marble Palace, led a Hayel-fight through the corridors against Mahid, killed Kurkas and then been emphatically fed wine by those of my friends who were left, who could tell I was delicate, while the rest of the army did what it would in the city. The closest I’d got was seeing houses burning through a window after I’d smelled smoke; from the time I’d leapt through, or at least from when I’d hit the ground, I’d been in other people’s hands, buried deep in the Imperial chambers in the Marble Palace. By the time I was out again, it was long over.

“I had said that I didn’t plan to sack Arko, but that day I didn’t give an order forbidding it, or forbidding the army to enter the city after the battle, so many people concluded I’d changed my mind. I understand now: it was the part of me that had wanted to do it that made me forget. I’d sworn an oath that I would, then decided to break it, then in the end honoured it; there are many who say that the sack of Arko was really a half-sack, so I guess it turned out just as it was in my mind.”

“That is what tends to happen,” he said. “Good. These are things everyone knows... now recount the deaths of the ten thousand Lakans.”

“I was apprenticed to Hurai Kadari. It was in Kantila. We’d captured them… the generals didn’t know what to do with them…” My tongue locked up. I tried to talk sense into myself, staring up at him wordlessly; I took a deep breath. I found words, but only a few, and it was like that all through, all short sentences and long pauses, and he kept having to tell me to breathe. When I came to the night on which they’d died, I had to lie silent for a long time, my hands over my face. He just waited, though I knew he was seeing the whole story in my aura.

It was recounting the one Lakan playing the harp that put me in tears, though I had been determined to tell it without. It was a while before I could speak again. Surya waited patiently.

“The sound of their cries... It’s not like from a sword-blow, there isn’t one death-scream, it just goes on and on and on… ten thousand… I just knelt, and listened, because it had been my idea. And I wept… and Hurai asked me, why the tears? I had conceived this… and this was what my life would be… then he said, because of my age, then, yes, I should weep… and know what war is… and grow up. More terrible than the sound was its fading… until finally there was silence. I didn’t sleep that night. Have I told enough?” Weeping took away my power of speech again.

“There is a stone there, raised in their memory, is there not?” he asked me, when I’d wept for a time. I signed chalk. “Do you know what it says?”

“Yes, it says: ‘In this circle lie ten thousand Lakans, their names too many to know, captured in Kantila by Yeolis under the command of Emao-e Lazaila on etesora 11, 1544, slain by Yeolis under the command of Hurai Kadari on etesora 16, by reason of the will of their king, Astyardk, who would return not even a finger-width of Yeoli land for all their lives. May reason bring peace to the living as death has brought peace to the dead.’ ”

“That’s exactly what it says?” he asked me. I signed chalk again. “How do you know?”

“Every time I have visited there since, I go up to see it,” I said. “Also, I wrote it.”

“Interesting,” he said. “Especially what’s missing.”

“I was a general’s apprentice,” I said. “My commands, my actions, were all unofficial… it was Hurai who was commander and so had to be named.”

“So from which do you still carry the greater mark: the sack of Arko, or this?”

I just closed my eyes and conceded the point with a sigh. When you are a warrior, you forget that you’d have to be inhuman for such a thing not to leave a mark on you. You forget everything of that nature.

Surya stroked a stray lock of hair out of my eyes, and his tenderness seemed a horror, an aberration, too kind a touch for one such as me. “Do you see why? Do you see the difference?” I signed charcoal.

“The sack of Arko is resolved. You atoned for it, quite publicly, by leaping out that window, then by telling all Arko that you had, and rebuilding the city. And you know that Arkans, or at least enough of them—a majority—have forgiven you. They wanted you back as Imperator enough to vote for it.

“But with the ten thousand Lakans, it was all in effect hush-hush. Even the memorial doesn’t bear your name. Have you ever told anyone in Laka that you were behind it?” I signed charcoal, remembering how glad I’d been, while I was asking Astalaz for his alliance against the Arkans, that I’d never confessed it to him. “So—no resolution. You have not confessed to them, you have not atoned, you have not been forgiven. I know it is very different; I know that their king did have the choice and it was done in answer to his choice. But…” His eyes flashed across my aura. “To the part of you that remembers that night and feels all that you felt, this is not enough of a reason. Hence it’s an unhealed wound in your soul.

“Let me put it this way: you have accepted entirely that you sacked Arko. You have not accepted entirely that you ordered the poisoning of ten thousand Lakans. Else you would not be so silent about it, and you’d have had as easy a time telling me as you did with the sack of Arko.”

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