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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69 - My people whom I love

Excerpt from the transcript of Chevenga’s farewell speech to Arko, published by the Pages of Arko, Muunas 20, 50^th P.A.

Every time I start a speech in Yeola-e I always say, “My people, whom I love.” And while I know it is strange for someone whose hair is this colour and curly and whose eyes are dark like mine to say “my people” to Arkans, love comes from the heart, and even if only in my heart, you are my people.

So: my people, whom I love:

When I first came to Arko, I wasn’t in a position to get the kindest impression of Arkans, on a slaver’s chain, and then in the Mezem. Then came the start of the war, and some other actions of the former Imperator that didn’t leave me warm towards him. Then my position was by necessity locked in enmity against Arko, until I carved my way onto the Crystal Throne.

I have been asked by many Yeolis, how can you stand Arkans? After what they did to us, after what they did to you, why don’t you hate them? Now you have them under your thumb, why don’t you make them suffer worse?

My answer is this: I don’t hate because there’s no point in hating. Hate solves no problems, hate rights no wrongs, hate does not feed a people, or shelter them, or even, in truth, defend them. Hate does not prevent wars, but engenders them. Hate makes only more hate; vengeance leads only to more vengeance.

If we have an argument with another nation because it, or its leaders, are blinded by greed or corruption, both of which always have underneath them, fear, do we do better hating, and putting further fear into its people, or do we do better encouraging them to open their eyes, by freeing them from what it is they fear?

If we gain power over them, do we do better etching fear and pain into their souls, which will grow into anger and desperation, or do we do better giving of what we have, sharing the ways of freedom that we know, so as to ease the fear and pain they live with?

Do we do better becoming worse enemies, or making peace and making friends?

When I first became Imperator, the nature of the economy of Arko was that prosperity was dependent on conquest. Arko could not sustain without growing; that’s how it worked. That meant an endless cost in lives, in maimings, in bereavement, and in fear, because a nation at war lives always with these things. I set out early on to change that, so that the people of Arko would have the choice to live and let live, so that they could know life in peacetime, life without the endless gnawing of fear.

I also set out to make Arko into a nation ruled by laws to which all Arkans are equally subject, and ruled by the will of its people through the vote, rather than the whim of a single person. One soul may be inclined to excess, or cruelty, or enmity against some portion of his own people, or even madness, as generations of Arkans know all too well; the greater the number sharing power, the more consistently moderate the decisions will be. And when even the Imperator is subject to the law, he can be kept honest by it.

I know it was difficult for Arkans to change their ways. I commend you all for your courage, your trust in me and your belief in yourselves, as you’ve taken up practices that are unfamiliar. These changes came to their full fruition with the election of Assembly in the spring, and then the regent and Imperator a little more than a half-month ago, and I think you already feel the sweetness of freedom and the lightening of your load.

How well I and all those who helped me did our work to make the new government resilient against corruption and despotism, only time will tell. It depends also on your vigilance as citizens and willingness to dismiss by vote those who succumb. I hope for the sake of Arko and for the sake of all the world, that Arko’s freedom from these things will last forever. There is no gift I would more gladly have given, and nothing I would rather be remembered for by the people of Arko.

In Yeola-e we have a definition for those who make war against us, first expressed by the sage for whom our nation is named: it is, “those who have no ears for our words of justice and sense,” in other words, those with whom it is impossible to settle differences by talk and agreement. What we faced in Arko was but one person who would not listen, and a nation of others who had no choice but to go along.

We leave an Arko in which the people have that choice.

I was asked by a writer on the day the Imperial vote was counted, will I be glad to leave? And despite the part of me that always desperately misses home and everyone there, I realized that Arko has become my second home, and I will miss everyone here when I am gone. I will miss the work, and though I never thought I’d say this—at one time in my life I was giving everything I had in me to get out of here—I’ll miss the place. The sun coming over the rim in the morning, the air, so quiet and warm at night so you hear talk all over the city, the green of the forest and the blue of the lake, the matchless beauty of the Avenue of Statuary, the shining of gold turrets; of course I’ll miss the Marble Palace and all the beauty in it.

And I will miss all of you, who have been so kind to me. I will miss living among those who gave me the ultimate mercy of forgiveness, for the act I regret most in my life.

I have my people, but I will always, in my heart, have my second people.

For myself, I go on to the next campaign in my life, one which has already been somewhat more dangerous than I expected, but which I go to with a great deal of eagerness and anticipation. I can’t yet really imagine what life will be when I go what my people call asa kraiya, beyond the sword. I’ve been so wed to it that hanging it up for good will be very strange to me. But I know it is what I must do; I know it’s the next course my life must take, and I look forward to it. I humbly ask for your best wishes and your blessings.

Where my life will go politically I am not entirely certain. I will remain semanakraseye of Yeola-e if my people continue to deem me acceptable. What else I will do I am not sure except that I will always keep my highest dream in mind: everlasting peace, the world over. When I was a child, and couldn’t know where life would take me when I grew up, I hoped that I would be known, at the end of my life, as one who had made peace. My ambition was to be called Chevenga the Peacemaker. I know that is hard to imagine, and I know that, if you don’t know Yeoli you don’t hear it, but Chevenga is very much a warrior’s name, it sounds incongruous with “Peacemaker.” But I wanted that nonetheless, and my intention for the rest of my life is to fulfill that ambition. If before I die, I make more peace than I have made war, if I preserve more lives than I have taken, I will go to my pyre satisfied with what I have done in life.

I have a lengthy list of Arkans to whom I owe thanks for all manner of things, so I hope this doesn’t go on too long…

†

Improper though it was as I had not formally relinquished the Seals yet, the night of the count, I had let Kallijas try them on while we were both naked and in private in the Imperial bedchamber. They were magnificent, winking gold on his long graceful fingers, even as he clenched his eyes shut and said, “I want to hide my head under the pillows.”

The day after, of course, I did relinquish them to him, in a ceremony in the Great Temple, with the Fenjitzas and Fenjitza presiding. Then I took him into the office where I kept the Imperial Book. It sang to him when he touched it as it had to me, and then showed the moving pictures and sounds on the first twelve pages just as it had for me. My touch did nothing now; only his. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel a wrenching in my heart.

On the twelfth page now was a portrait of him, looking bewildered just as he did now. “It captures an Imperator’s image somehow,” I said. He just closed his eyes again, saying, “I am trying to keep this all from being too much.”

There is little more to tell, of the Arkan part of my life. I felt two eight-days would do it for the transition. By getting up and dawn and staying up until the death-hour I managed both to finish writing the constitution, and stay at Kallijas’s elbow most of the time while he worked, teaching him the procedures, introducing him to the underlings and so forth. So he got to sign it, not I, once Assembly had ratified it, unanimously; but, bless his heart, he added a line for me to sign as author.

Moving his own and the family things, Skorsas took charge of, taking the entire two eight-days. Tawaen had already left to spend the summer in Leyere with his mother; the other children would fly with us.

The Yeoli garrison in Arko was closed up and the warriors sent home, along with all the guards but a handful for me and mine. Some of the Yeoli staff at the Marble Palace stayed on, but most left, necessitating much hiring. Most Yeolis in Arko were leaving, including what was left of the Yeoli hawks.

Rafas cancelled the charges against Faraiko and Kamallo for election-stealing, as the law had not been in place when they had done it, and Kamallo fled back to Yeola-e; with Faraiko it didn’t matter, since she was one of the fourteen who’d been charged with plotting to assassinate me.

They were tried during the transition. Because I had relinquished the Seals and the new constitution was now in force, there was no longer a law requiring that Yeolis be tried before a Yeoli judge, so it was an Arkan, for all their advocates argued. I was called as a witness to give my opinion of what the effect would have been, had they succeeded; it was like reliving Sharaina’s trial. At least I didn’t have to have a screaming-match with one or more of them while I was in the chair of testimony, as no one was arguing justification. Their arguments were pretty much entirely comprised of blaming each other and Inatalla.

For all their diligence, Rafas’ people were not able to catch Inatalla before he got away to Brahvniki, made it very public that he was there fleeing political persecution, so that he couldn’t just be spirited back secretly. Since Brahvniki offers refuge to such people as a matter of course, he was safe there so long as he didn’t break their laws. I’ll have to have a talk with Stevahn about drafting an extradition treaty, I thought, until I realized I could no longer speak for Arko, my second people, whom I loved. Kall would have to do it.




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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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67 - Imperator Elect

In the divine witness of the Ten Gods, by these presents, my final signed document as Imperator of Arko, I, Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e, acting both as Imperator and as semanakraseye of Yeola-e with the full voted approval of the Assembly of Yeola-e, relinquish all claim of legal power over the Empire of Arko on behalf of myself and on behalf of the nation of Yeola-e, and declare the Empire of Arko a nation sovereign and free; by these presents also, I also accept of the vote of the people of Arko, legally conducted on Anae 36, the final day of the 51^st-to-last year of the Present Age, to choose a new Imperator, and relinquish the office, signs, seals, powers, privileges and obligations of the Imperator to the legally-chosen Imperator Elect,

Under the light of a torch, I had signed and stamped it with the four Imperial Seals; I would fill the name in when I knew it.

It was coming clearer, or so I hoped. Kallijas and Minis’s flag was a full flag-width higher than Adamas’s, now, and their supporters had thoroughly seized control of the din in the square. It’s the west, I thought. Marsae had just been added in. Yes, people are only voting for two years of Kallijas; but they’re also thinking, anyone he is willing to regent for is good too.

“It looks as if you’ll be swearing to your son,” I yelled to Inensa over the racket, “rather than using that needle on yourself.” She looked at me, cocking her head slightly in a sudden motion like a bird, as if in incomprehension. I touched my own shield-hand palm with my sword-hand finger. “Or were you planning to use it on someone else?”

I was speaking to her in Arkan; her Yeoli guard remained blissfully ignorant, but her Arkan guard stared at me, then at her, pointedly, his hand suddenly on his sword-hilt. “Stand down,” I said to him. Minis stared at her, his eyes widening to white all around the blue. “Mother!” he gasped.

Inensa glanced up at the flags. “You think it is certain, Shefen-kas?”

“Well, let’s see.” I wandered over to the counting desk. She followed, bringing a son and two guards in a stiff moving tableau with me. I hadn’t paid attention to the numbers, all night, but this was good reason. “What’s the total counted so far?” I asked the confirming-clerk.

“Just shy of four million,” he said. “Looks like another half-million or so to go, so, only another half-bead, Imperator.”

I wanted to leap for joy. There are about eight million people in the empire. Only people past third threshold, age twenty-one, are permitted to vote. Four and a half million was a million and a half more than had voted in either of the impeachment votes.

Each time you taste it, Arko, I thought, you drink a little deeper, tighten your grasp on your own power that much more. Maybe already you are thinking, ‘I will never let it go.’ That thought is the death of tyrants; or their forestalling in the first place. Take it, Arko. It is the one form of power that never corrupts.

“Not quite certain, Inensa,” I said, “but Adamas would have to win an implausibly-large majority of the remaining votes to catch up. Arko knows it; listen to them.”

She turned her shield-hand palm-up and with her sword-hand glove-tips, drew the needle out of its pocket, as only an Arkan would have the skill to do. She surrendered it to the Yeoli guard. “Tell him not even to scratch himself with it,” she said to me. “It has datura juice on it.”

I interpreted for her, and the guard said “A-e kras,” wrapped it very carefully in a slip of paper and tucked it into his pouch. “She doesn’t have anything else on her, does she, Chevenga?” he asked me. I signed charcoal.

“I understand why you had that,” Minis said to her, his lips taut. “But I would prefer there be nothing more between us that is necessary to understand in that way.”

“I hear,” she said, very impassively, but did not add, “I obey.”

“Whether you meant it for yourself or for me, either way,” I said, “you’d be doing your son out of someone who means everything to him.” She stared at me impassively. “You know what he needs from you, yes?” Minis turned and scurried away, covering his face with his hands.

“I know. He needs me as a mother... a parent. I am concerned that I cannot correct… re-align… my thinking enough to provide him that.”

“He doesn’t need anything a parent gives but one, because he’s effectively grown up. He needs the one thing that parents give even to their grown children: love. Do you think he got it from Kurkas?”

Inensa showed the most emotion yet, pinching her eyes tightly shut just for an instant, as if something had come at her face.

“Mahid are not taught how to love,” she said, in a dead voice. “I do not know how.” She touched the motherstone.

“A person doesn’t need to be taught how to love. They need to be trained out of it. You see the look on a young child’s face; you think he was taught that?” She shook her head stiffly. “I don’t know how young he was when he was taken from you. But somewhere in him he remembers nine moons in your womb.”

“He was taken from me the moment he was born. I only saw a glimpse of him. I only knew him inside... never outside, as mine.” A thin strand of hair had fallen out of her coiff beside her ear; in the torchlight I saw it was trembling.

“You remember, too: inside, as you say.”

“When the count is over they sound the gong, do they not? It must be soon now,” she said. Then, as if her attempt to change the subject had failed with herself, she said, “I felt him move within me. I was not to speak to him, nor sing to him while I carried him. I admit the failure. If he had been female... no loss, but... he might become the Heir.

“All he wants, all he needs, from you is whatever it was in you that made you sing to him,” I said. She nodded. Someone walked near with a torch, and I saw her eyes, though dry, were red-rimmed under the face-paint.

Minis lurked at the edge of our conversation, wanting to return, but afraid of what he might hear. I beckoned him in. “Inensa, I think your son will be more solid on the throne this way than he would have been the other way,” I said. “It may not seem that way, but I know what people feel when they’ve chosen someone by vote.”

She nodded in her stiff way. “You really can feel it, can’t you?” Minis asked me. “The vote.”

“Yes, I can.”

“What laid you all but flat, when they held up those candles.”

“Minis—” The flags had been moved again, and the roar was so loud I waited for it to ebb before I went on, and used my battlefield voice even when it had. “There is nothing like it! You’re about to find out. Everyone who has thoughts of deposing or assassinating you knows he’s going against the will of the people. There’s a force to that, which inhibits. Not all of them, but most; look at the difference between my two terms, how many assassination attempts.”

“It’s like courting,” he bellowed back. “Will they like me? Will they want me? Do they love me? They love you; it’s obvious.”

“They love you too, that’s what you’re finding out. At least enough to give you a chance. It’s the ultimate courting, in a way.”

“Not that I know anything about courting… Chevenga, when the fear goes away… I don’t know what I’ll feel.”

“At that point, it won’t matter what you feel,” I shouted. “You just have to do your work. What is more important than them loving you is you loving them. I know you plan not to forget that, but repeating never hurts. I still repeat it to myself.”

“Even when they piss you off?” He looked at his mother, then down at the madly torch-waving crowd.

“You want to come a little aside, I’ll let you in on something!” As long as no one was within arm’s length, there wasn’t a chance of our words being heard.

“A little more than an eight-day after we announced your candidacy... I talked with Surya about what my people have asked of me, in my life.”

“Too much, if you ask me,” he said, with a bit of a spitting in his tone.

“The next day, thinking about it, I got so angry I decided, ‘I quit. Right here, right now. I’m not going to raise a finger for them, not for another moment.’ And I took off the signet and the seals.”

He stared at me, brows so high they put a middle-aged man’s crease on his young forehead.

“Kallijas knocked me senseless.” The crease gained a few more years. “Seriously; when he saw the seals, bang. He apologized when I woke up, but told me it was to give him and others close to me a chance to talk sense into me. Which they did. If you heal from madness, madness can come up sometimes.”

“I’m very glad he was there,” Minis shouted drily.

“Yes, in the end, so am I. I had to thank him with my hand on my forelock. Point being, I had a lapse in my love for them, while I was still on duty, and that is wrong. You have to be careful, you have to watch for it in yourself, and, yes, have others around who are utterly trustworthy. The position demands perfection; but we are only human. The only way to correct our own flaws is to listen with open heart to others.”

“I wish perfection were possible,” Minis bellowed.

“Feh! That’d make it too easy.” He snorted, and made a pout at me like a child.

I went back towards the edge of the roof, and a herd of writers surged toward me, somehow giving itself permission. “Imperator Kallijas and Minis have won your thoughts how much do you credit your own recommendation why do you think they did how do you feel about it is it hard to give up the Crystal Throne what will this mean to Arko…” Other herds were after Minis and Kallijas and the other candidates as well.

A hand touched my elbow. “Imperator…” I saw the Ministry of Scales insignia; a count official. They were done. I waved off the writers, thankful to have the excuse. The official took me to the confirmation desk, pulling out a chair for me. The counting chief was just finishing signing off the document which laid out the final totals. “If you will certify it, Imperator,” he said to me.

Minis Kurkas Joras Amitzas Aan upon Third Threshold with Kallijas Itrean Aitzas serving as Regent until that time: 1,898,769

Adamas Kallen Aitzas: 1,720,532

Kin Immen Kazien Aitzas: 481,023

Mil Torii Itzan Aitzas: 358,027

Total Votes: 4,458,351

“Gather all the candidates here,” I said, and three Scales people fanned out from the desk, elbowing their way through the writers. Through a momentary break in the thicket of people, I saw Minis and his mother. They had their arms around each other.

“You all witness this,” I said, once they were all here, showing them the document. Adamas looked as if he’d taken a bite from a rotten fruit. “Do you all accept these totals as true and legal and to be enacted as the will of the people of Arko? I ask you to sign to that.” Mil moved first to take the pen, then Kin; Minis and Kall hung back so as not to seem too eager. The motion of Adamas’s hand, as he signed, was full of bitterness. When all five had, I signed and sealed it myself, and said, “Sound the gong.”

As they did, the ring shaking us all to the bones, only to be drowned out by the howl of the crowd, Kall came close beside me. I felt I should look at him closely. His eyes were filled with something I had never seen in them before, something I’d never even imagined in them: abject terror. I put my arms around him and pulled him close. “M-m-muunas help me,” he stammered, his lips almost on my ear, the only way I could hear his voice. “Please d-d-don’t let go of me, Sheng… I’m f-f-fikken Imperator.”





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66 - The mother stone

All through the campaign, we had discerned as best we could whether favour for Minis and Kallijas would be stronger in the City Itself or out. One in ten citizens of the Empire, roughly, live within the City, and as well the rest of the Empire very much takes its marching orders on what to think from the City, for all people in Marsae or Fispur or Anoseth would be loathe to admit it.

So it had always mattered, but suddenly it mattered a great deal more, and on the Marble Palace roof there was talk about virtually nothing else.

Kallijas was from the City, of course, and so could count on much favour there; he was also much loved in Kurkania from his years of fighting there. But people knew they were voting only for two years of him.

Minis’ childish reputation as a hellion he’d made in the City, of course, and it was hard to measure how much he’d succeeded in countering it since. He’d won favour by distancing himself from his father by having spurned his father’s plans for him, leaving the Mahid and revealing himself to me so as to prevent future civil war. The Pages had cautiously recommended him; but of course he wrote for them, and everyone knew that now. The final factor was the Miksas tract, of course, whose effect could clearly be delineated as ending at the Rim. How much did it account for Minis and Kall losing in the City? A great deal, we were now hoping.

Then there was my part, since Kall and Minis not only had my recommendation but were both known to see eye-to-eye with me politically and as very close to me. At least for this there was a record to derive some clue from, the vote returns from my and then Artira’s impeachment votes.

In both, I’d done better in the west, where there were fewer kin of solas who died fighting me, and done worst in the City. For all enough city Arkans to jam the square had come out once to celebrate my return and again to affirm with candles their wishes for long life, those who would never vote for me or anything I supported because the blood of those they had loved was on my hands were very many too.

When it came to the new ways I had brought to Arko, which Kall and Minis had sworn to continue and Adamas to reverse, there was a clear difference in favour not so much between the City Itself and the rest of the Empire but between city and country in general. The larger the town, the more it leaned chalk. Here, we’d been counting on Arko the City to carry the banner. Had Miksas’s story alone dashed that, persuading people to vote from fear than from reason, as it is all too easy to do? We had to hope so, now.

Twilight turned to full dark, and the crowd’s songs and chants grew more intense as the flags crept upwards. The red-silver began gaining on the green; when Minis came back from his swim he was not ahead, but he was closer, and he took heart from that. Still, he was twitchy as a purebred horse. He half-approached me, then turned away, then did it again, as if he wanted to tell me something but was afraid. The third time I beckoned him over and asked him, “What is it?”

“I was thinking…” He cast his eyes downward, and fidgeted with his feet. “Is it possible… may we… bring my mother up here?”

“Is that all? Of course, Minis.”

“Under guard, of course,” he said hastily. “She might not be safe, don’t go anywhere near her, all right?”

“What, she’s going to assassinate me, just as I’m about to give it up, with her bare hands, from between two guards? I didn’t think the Mahid trained their women that well.”

He sighed. “Of course not, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to suggest anything…” I sent Krero and First Amitzas for her, and Minis rushed away with them. Now and then, since she’d been brought to the dungeon, he’d visited her, but clearly he hadn’t already asked if she wanted to come up tonight, and so had to now.

He was back first; she was coming, but had requested use of a bath and boudoir in the Mahid section to make herself presentable, first, which Amitzas and Krero had granted.

“You’re going to introduce us, I hope,” I said to Minis. “Or do you think she’d be comfortable with being introduced to an Imperator, at least for a bead or two more, to whom she hasn’t sworn?”

“My… mother?” He stared at me. “I… well, I’d love that. Her… I don’t know. Muunas… I feel completely wrung out, and we still have our speeches to do.” He glanced at the flags, and took a deep breath.

“You’re gaining steadily,” I said. “If that continues, you’ll have it. Think of that.” By the time Inensa came onto the roof, the flags were dead even, and his face was brightening.

Between two guards, one Yeoli and one Arkan, came a woman who was Mahid from head to toe, her silken gown and gloves onyxine, a square silver brooch precisely placed beneath the centre of her high collar, the masses of her white-blond hair impeccably braided and bound. She walked spear-straight and with chin high, her hands folded stiffly together at her waist. In what must be a hidden pocket in the palm of her shield-hand glove she held a Mahid killing-needle.

He went scurrying to greet her, and to bring her to me. It’s common knowledge I have weapon-sense now; does she not know? Of course she’d gone straight from the woods to the dungeon, and she was an Arkan woman, required by tradition to know nothing of war. Yet she knows enough to have that... As one invariably does, I looked for the resemblance. Minis’s gracile build was hers, I saw, as well as the lines of brow and nose. She was perhaps in her mid-thirties.

As Minis introduced us, she regarded me with the stonily impassive Mahid face. “I’m pleased to meet you,” I said, and extended my hand, ready to whip it away if I had to. She didn’t extend hers.

“Fourth Shefen-kas.” She spoke utterly without emotion, and equal-to-equal. “I am not sure how to answer you. I cannot acknowledge you the way my son wishes.”

“You need not,” I said. “You, he and I have our agreement.”

“I am completely without direction and guide and am unsure what is correct,” she said. Meaning no one’s giving her orders, I thought; there is no Imperator she recognizes and she doesn’t even have a man to rule her. At least the sharp diction Mahid use made her audible over the crowd. “I do know that I am able to acknowledge my own child and for that I have you to thank. Thank you.”

“You are more than welcome.” I glanced at the flags. Was I imagining it, or was the red-silver a hair higher?

“How…” she trailed off to silence.

“How…?”

“How can you bear this… uncertainty?” She lifted her chin, towards the flags. “Never knowing who will be in control?

“But I always know who is in control,” I said. “The people.”

“A mob cannot pilot a ship or direct a horse. How can the mass of them direct a country?”

“They can’t, always. So they choose someone, as Arko has now. I’m used to the mob; born and bred, you know.”

“So I understand. Though it still seems very messy and disorganized to me.”

“The Yeoli mob actually does direct things, to a great degree. It takes a great deal of arranging and organizing, but we’ve been doing it a long time—a millennium and a half—so we have the methods well-refined.”

“My son tells me that I might understand you if I think of you as your people’s sole Mahid. First Amitzas confirms this thinking.”

I couldn’t help but smile. “There is more truth to that than many Yeolis would like to admit,” I said. “Ultimate and unquestioning loyalty: exactly the same. The sacrifice of my life if I am asked to, that too; it’s woven into all the customs. There are very strict laws governing what I do, and thoughts considered correct and incorrect. We even have our forms of correction, albeit less torturous.”

“I’ve even heard that when you are not in the Imperial white-and-gold, you have a penchant for onyxine.” Had she been talking to Surya?

“I’ve been known to. Something I have always wanted to say to you, Inensa, and I hope the case is extreme enough that I may be forgiven for speaking ill of the dead: for having been married to Second Amitzas Mahid, you have my sympathy.” Only after the words were out of my mouth did it occur to me that she might not yet have been told he was dead.

“Rest he in Celestialis,” she said tightly. Her face gave no clue at all, but Minis’s, ever naked, hadn’t changed either, so it seemed she’d known. “I thank you for your sympathy.” Whether it was from true gratitude or pure formality, I couldn’t tell.

“He touched all three of our lives, didn’t he?” I said. “Mine less than either of yours, and yet still significantly.”

“How far do you intend to take your vengeance against him?” Inensa asked me, looking me straight in the eyes as an Arkan woman will rarely do.

“I’m done. He’s dead. Why?”

“I carry his child in my body.”

Now Minis’s face changed; he stared at her, amazed. “M-m-mother… you didn’t tell me that!”

“I have no intention of harming his, and your, child,” I said. But she was going to accept execution rather than swearing; maybe this is why he was able to talk her into holding off deciding…? Right then there was a swelling in the crowd noise, and it changed, the Kallijas-Minis chants surging. I looked up; the flags had just been raised again. The red-silver was clearly higher than the green.

“I thank you, Shefen-kas. It will be my son’s decision whether this child will be the beginning of his own Mahid, if the lead he now has sustains until the end.” Minis stood frozen, speechless; I could see him thinking, brother… or sister... “In the meantime, Minis: I recommend that you never acquire a taste for administering Mahid’s Obedience to your bed partners.” That didn’t help; already pale, his face lost even more blood, and he looked as if he was about to throw up. The part of me that remembered, in my bones, the Mahid drug whose only effect is pure pain went internally weak as well. How often did he... I took a deep breath. He was dead; she was free.

“It may not be only the Imperator who decides what the existing Mahid will do, or whether there will be a new line,” I said. “There’s Assembly, now, too. My thought is that the Mahid should be what has always been best about them, and leave behind what was worst.”

She looked at me with a trace of an arching of her brow, if I wasn’t imagining it. “And what were we, other than a weapon of the Imperator’s terror? Our loyalty was always what was best about us, in my opinion.”

“I agree. Insofar as you are loyal to something that is good, it’s a virtue.”

“So you, who believe so firmly in the freedom of the mob as exercised through the vote, do not think that people who make themselves a blank page for a ruler to write upon freely can be dangerous?” An Arkan woman is debating me, I thought. I remembered thinking she must be intelligent, because Minis had to have got it from somewhere.

“They are a reflection only of him. They give up their own choices. Insofar as he is dangerous, they are dangerous. As I was, Yeoli Mahid that I am; I was the sword in my own people’s hand, with as little choice, against Arko.”

“That’s not what I understand,” she said drily. “Some say it was entirely your choice, and they followed you.” I’m not going to live down being made to answer that question, I thought, even if Surya manages to make me live to two hundred. “Yet… if the Imperator becomes the reflection of his people, the Mahid could become a much larger reflection as well.”

“Yes,” I said. “May the Mahid be that.” She blinked, and her mouth made a momentary twitch of a smile before becoming stone again. “Another thing I have wanted to tell you: I am proud of your son.” Was I imagining it, or was there a softening in her eyes?

“Minis,” she said, and I thought I heard her voice soften too, “has very little of the darkness seeded in him, and I appreciate the lightness he radiates. I am also pleased you have seen this in him.” I cast a glance at him; he looked as if he’d just been cold-cocked by a God.

“It was obvious to me when he was ten,” I said.

From somewhere within her gown, Inensa drew out a thumbnail-sized yellow diamond, cut in the round, many-facetted style that throws the most sparkles, on a golden chain. I heard Minis gasp. She slung it around her neck, carefully arranging her hair over it, while he stared, his mouth hanging open.

I realized: it was the mother-stone he had given her. Arkan boys usually gift their mothers with one at first threshold; thinking ‘better late than never,’ he’d given it to her the day after she’d been locked in the dungeon. Now more than ever, she seemed to be thinking, when the mother’s gushy smile most wants to spread over my face, I must school it. Her face remained stone.




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