162 - May reason bring peace to the living

I should have known, when he spoke of acceptance, what I was in for next. I’d say, it was a tenar menhu so hard I thought it would kill me, except that every tenar menhu has been like that. Once broken open, I let out feeling for about two beads. He just stayed with me, being the steadiness in my chaos, and afterwards I felt peacefully empty.

“I’d give you orders,” he said afterwards, when every word seemed to fall into me and echo like a coin falling into a great iron cauldron, “but I think you know what they should be—am I right?”

“Tell Astalaz,” I whispered, since I’d shredded my voice. “As the one who stands for his people. And have the inscription added to, so my name is on it.” He signed chalk and patted my shoulder.

I am discovering who I am without my self-curse, I thought as I re-read Astalaz’s letter, at the same time as everyone else.

It’s a one and a half-day flight, usually, from Vae Arahi to Tardengk. Once I was there, it took time as always to get through all the Lakan formalities, such as the dancing with the gold finger-cymbals, the forty-two course kri-laced meal that could burn the wax out of your ears, and the swapping of gifts, before we could just talk.

He was kind enough to invite me up to his office, which looked as if a storm had blown through it as always, and ceremonially sweep clear a space for a game of mrik on his desk, landing a pile of papers on the floor, before making it clear by a length of silent attention that it was time for me to get to the point.

I’d meant to tell it coolly, but felt my face reddening the moment I said I had come to tell him something I should have years before, and stumbled through the rest; the best you could say was that I managed not to cry. He showed no sign of noticing my shame. He fingered the mrik-stones absently as he listened; I remember he placed one in the centre of the desk, and ranged more in widening circles around it.

“So it was your idea, J’vengka,” he said, without shock. “You know, when Arzaktaj got back after the Arkan war, he told me the nature of your ruthlessness. You’d always leave the enemy a choice. A choice that might be the ultimate bitterness and pain, perhaps, but—well, it’s that Yeoli thing you always say, ‘As always, you choose,’ yes? When I heard that, the massacre of the ten thousand and the choice that had been offered my father came to mind. And I thought, ‘J’vengka was there. He was young, but had already done things far beyond his years… could he have been behind it?’ ”

“Well,” I said, “I’d ask you, ‘Am I that easy to know?’, but if there’s anything this path I’ve taken has taught me, it’s that we’re all much easier to know than we think we are.” I thought he might laugh knowingly, but instead he nodded sagely, showing me he hadn’t learned this yet. At least he wouldn’t have to learn it the way I had.

Or perhaps he hadn’t really heard me, his mind on what he was about to tell me. “Did you know that my father’s answer to your threat, his disregard for those men, was the final reason I had for deposing him?”

I froze in my chair. It never ceases being a shock, finding out that you’ve had more of a hand in history than you knew. “No,” I said. “I had no idea.” The fact that he’d thought I might know meant he hadn’t kept it secret, but it hadn’t got back to me. Of course my hand in the deaths of the ten thousand was not well-known.

“We had too many people for the land we hold. He needed either to get rid of people, or gain land, or both. Either way, a benefit, as he saw it.”

“That I did learn, afterwards.” I kept my opinion to myself.

“He gained no land—you are too good as warriors—but he got rid of people.” I felt sick. It is one thing to theorize such a thing; you can always keep in the back of your mind that perhaps you are being too cynical. It is another to hear it stated, baldly.

“That was the tipping point, the moment I became convinced his choices in this life must end.” As always, we were talking over wine. I took a swallow now. “You have blamed yourself for their deaths, haven’t you, J’vengka?”

I asked myself, Surya-style, ‘What is in this?’ before I answered. “Yes and no. In my mind I share the blame with your father, and also with Hurai and Emao-e, who had rank over me and so could have decided otherwise. In my heart… well, it’s as my healer showed me; to the part of me that remembers that night, no reason is enough.”

I told him how it had gone: the command council, how Hurai had warned me that we’d have to go through with it if Astyardk refused, how I’d shrugged it off, never believing he would throw away ten thousand of his people, and couldn’t believe it when I heard he had. Maybe going asa kraiya was making my face easier to read; as I was telling him this, he topped up my goblet of wine and slid it closer to me.

“I remember those men in my prayers every night,” he told me, and also that he said priests say prayers aloud—“I don’t have ten thousand priests, as I wish, but it is one man per day”—which was a balm.

“The point is not to hurt for their sacrifice, but to not waste it,” he said. He’d already made several points based on what Lakans believe about reincarnation, and the debts and lessons that extend, in their thinking, from life to life; I’d just acknowledged, to humour him. But this one, I understood.

“I wrote their epitaph,” I said. “The last line was, ‘May reason bring peace to the living as death has brought peace to the dead.’”

“I didn’t know you wrote it. That line is your own, not a Yeoli saying?”

“A reference, in part, to another saying. On my way home from here, I’m going to go there, and add something to it. Nowhere does it say my name, and it should.”

“Is that for shame, or for responsibility?”

“Responsibility… whether for shame or credit, responsibility, either way. Most exactly, it’s to stop hiding my part. Some would blame me, some would credit me; they can do neither if they don’t know.” I hadn’t worded it yet, though I’d been flogging myself to do it all the way here; my mind kept shying away from forming the words.

“They must have trusted you to honour them properly, or they would not have given up their lives for it... but it also changed Laka, their home, changed the king. There was more than one reason for their deaths.”

This time I argued with him, a little. “I could hardly know that would happen, when I thought of it.”

“Ultimately the workings of fate are complicated beyond our understanding, but we still have to try... and I do understand. I am not angry, if you are worried about this.”

“I wasn’t sure what you’d think,” I said. “I wouldn’t blame you if you were.”

“Now you know what I thought. I chose to kill my father over it. His life was not worth more than ten thousand to me.”

The vertigo of having touched more than I knew came over me again; I took a deep breath and a sip from the goblet. “I guess… I more expected you’d be angry at me for not telling you until now.” He laughed, a little harshly. “So if you want to berate me for that, go ahead, I was expecting it.

“I am not going to berate you for it, J’vengka. If you were taking their deaths lightly, I would be enraged. But you’re not.”

“They were ten thousand,” I said. “And, to see them die all at once—”

He stared at me, his brows rising. “You witnessed it?”

I told him how I’d been put in charge, had to decide the method, enact it, give the orders. He gazed at me in increasing horror. “But you couldn’t have been older than…”

“Sixteen,” I said.

“You were barely more than a child!”

I couldn’t speak. Everything that Surya had taught me had enabled me to feel such shock on my own behalf, and now I found I couldn’t conceal it.

“You took it on yourself and now you discharge your responsibility, to me, their King in that life,” Astalaz said gently. I just nodded. “I am glad you are no longer holding your silence and clutching their dying to yourself, in the dark.”

“I could write to ten-thousand families... except I have no idea who they are. Did they... all come from one area, or from all over?”

“From all over Laka. The army is conscripted from the country, usually younger sons. As we say, ‘One heir, one soldier, one priest, one merchant and a girl for grandchildren.’ ” Lakans are eminently practical, in their way.

“If they’d come from one place, I’d be tempted to go there. And recount it publicly.”

He topped me up again. “You’ve told me, J’vengka; that’s enough. As King I stand for them.” I could almost see him imagining me being chased by a mob with scythes and pitchforks. “You have given me your witness; I accept.” He took both my hands. “And now I will remember, as well. May the Gods witness the courage of men and may we cease needing it one day. If I forgive you for your action, based on information you did not and could not know, are you able to forgive yourself?”

I couldn’t answer for a moment. “If you were to ask a Yeoli,” I said finally, “there’s nothing to forgive because I did nothing wrong.”

“I forgive you,” he said. “In their names as well as my own.”

If you were to ask a Yeoli, I did nothing wrong; and yet tears came to my eyes, harder again when he embraced me, and I said, “Thank you.”

†

I would have carved it into the stone with my own hands, had I the skill to make the letters as perfect as they should be. The full inscription now reads:

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.

~

When I conceived the above words, I left out my own part, as it was unofficial. As a general’s apprentice, I conceived the idea, conceived the method, commanded and witnessed the execution and the first stage of the burial. “When one person guards a secret, everyone else is unarmed with truth, and thus defenseless.”-Linasika Aramichiya, Servant of Michalere.

-First Virani-e Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e, atakina 48 1556.

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