69 - The tyrant's machine-monster

I felt as if I knew nothing, so I decided to start tentatively. After a day or two I began to feel I was still myself, remembered my training, and settled into it.

I appointed myself First General First, but asked Assembly to discuss and approve it, though I was not required to by any tradition (and semanakraseyel after me might resent that I’d set the precedent). I wanted to be very solid in the position, for what was coming.

The worst reservations were that I had not completed my Circle School training; part of it is to study and practice naval warfare in Selina, and I hadn’t had time yet. I promised I would when I next had the chance.

They also took the sensible step of asking Emao-e whether I’d be good at it as she was; if there was anyone who would not be biased in my favour, it would be her, since she’d be losing the position. She answered that it was not a fair comparison, since I was a fighting general and she preferred the hill-top, but I was capable enough that she would be happy fighting under my command, and Yeola-e would not be in any more danger than it would with her in the position.

So I started wearing the circles of the chakrachaseye, and my friendships changed, as couldn’t be helped. I felt it when I did my first inspection wearing them, and saw my old clique standing stiff as if I were my father. The bureaucrats who’d scatted me away from their desks all my life now came respectfully when I called, and I stopped hearing the office gossip.

Aside from family and the best friends, the closest to me now were Chinisa, who had been my father’s secretary as well as my aunt’s, and could organize a semanakraseye’s life in her sleep, the five high ministers, who had all been experts before I was born, those Servants who made it a point to fraternize with me, and the three demarchic scribes of the Workfast Proclamatory, doing their work of tripping me up as best they could. I made all those I could persuade call me by name.

Only Mana thought me unchanged, and so did not himself change. Great ability lifts one apart from others, he had always said, so that one needs an earthbound friend, and he would be mine. He was right in the need, but wrong in the cause, because I never told him. Had I, he would not have believed that I had foreknowledge.

Mana was an athye’s athye, one who credited nothing that could not be shown him. Speak of the Hermaphrodite or the Twin Hawks as anything but metaphors, or claim to have powers that could not be immediately tested, and he’d grow an uneasy grin like a foreigner’s in the heart of Yeola-e, make some deflating joke or argue that it could have been chance or power of will. The God-In-Him, to his mind, was a perfect sword-stroke or a flawless Enchian conjugation.

The good of that for me was that with him I could live as I had before seven. He was my strongest tie to the innocence I’d had then; I could forget in his laughter, as in good wine. Call it avoidance; but we all get drunk now and then.

As a semanakraseye should, I undertook to learn what spirit my taking the office was being greeted in, partly by walking incognito in Terera Square. With many it had a shade of a new love affair; they were besotted with me, for reasons that my mind had names for but my heart could only feel bewildered by. Worse, because of my name as a warrior, people hoped for peace for a long time, which made me want to weep.

The semanakraseyesin became my day-in-day-out life. There were Lakan border matters to clear up with Astalaz, which went well. Just as the first snow fell on Vae Arahi, there was an earthquake in Enthira; my first news of it came when I reached for a paper that had fallen under my desk, and was lurched almost out of my chair, then saw the tea in my cup quivering even though nothing moving had been near it. That night I lay sleepless waiting to see if a runner would come, and from where, until she did. The town was all but razed, and in the end four hundred people died. I went there with two hundred of the darya semanakraseyeni, and pulled the living and the dead from under their fallen houses for three unbroken days.

The rest of it was sorting out what Tyeraha had handed to me, and learning those things no training but only the work itself can teach. I went to the same fate my father had before me: sitting in the demarchic chair in Assembly while knowing I was the youngest here by far. Once they knew me beyond formality all the Servants started calling me “lad.” Of course people tested me, as children do a stepfather, but I showed firmness when I had to, and got a name for cutting to the heart of matters.

Shaina, Etana and I settled in to a good bond, all-encompassing between the two of them, light and friendly for me, and full, naturally, of political shoptalk.

Fifth Chevenga haunted the Hearthstone, though people said he was more shy than I had been. Though some still frowned on how I’d got him, no one could deny he was full-blood Yeoli, and mine. It helped that he was quick. When people not related to him noticed it, I knew it was true and not just fatherly pride biasing my judgment. At two he spoke in full sentences, or more often in questions, gaining a perfect Vae Arahi accent, and he missed nothing. Of course his little hands were into everything. My grandmother minded him in the day, as she had me.

About two months past the winter solstice, Shaina conceived, and I began the joyful desperate wait for my second child. Having a boy I hoped for a girl, of course, and all the signs, the feathers laid over the womb and my mother’s hunch and even something Jinai Oru tossed off in passing in a reading for someone else, predicted one. The drawback was, since I lay with Shaina only for conception, by our agreement I was out of her bed for two years at the very least.

There are needs permitted to a youthful anaraseye or warrior in the field that a semanakraseye, especially married, is expected to have mastered, for all his body might tell him that that was only yesterday. To borrow the Lakan idiom, I practiced my sword-grip a lot. As well I threw myself harder into my work, and raising Fifth; I moved his crib into my Hearthstone office, and began staying there late into the night.

Mana and Kunarda both got accepted into the Elite Demarchic Guard. Krero continued rising in the ranks in the greater Guard, making setakraseye; Sachara kept up his training but studied Iyesian classics, with the aim of teaching. Nyera bought into a weaving workfast in Thara-e and moved there, much to the grief of the rest of us. All but Krero courted, and took falls; none married.

When one has a name as a warrior, one also gets a name for being warlike; those to whom war is alien or inimical, to whom I looked frightening with all my muscles and scars, will think such things, and make them part of the common opinion, and I didn’t want that. So I took some politician’s measures; I let the back of my hair grow past my shoulders and the forelock fall to a peak between my eyebrows, wore loose long sleeves, and mentioned often how well war teaches the necessity of peace. Having Fifth in tow so much helped. The talk lessened.

In the spring, I spoke my plans to make state visits to Kranaj, Astalaz, Ivahn and Bitha Szten, head of the largest clan of the Schvait Confederation, which is as close as the Schvait have to a head of state. It is traditional but not necessary, several argued, worried that as a new and young semanakraseye I might appear to them to be running to them as if to appease, and thus weaken us. I wanted to say, “Me? The one who’s been called cocky all his life?”

Krero, bless him, said, “I understand, Cheng: a state visit is almost the only thing you can do without the people’s orders, so, you being you, you’ve got to.” When I showed my annoyance, he asked if I’d got so uppity I couldn’t take a joke. My only thought was, as a person does better with friends, so does a nation. History, I think, has proved me right.

I also spoke my plans in Assembly to make a state visit to Arko.

In the break afterwards, a hand caught my shoulder as I left the Assembly chamber and spun me around so hard I went into stance. “You headstrong little fool—are you mad?” Esora-e exerted political influence as subtly as he had parental. While I stood open-mouthed in shock, he went on. “Can’t you see? Those blond child-rapers, every one of them, their oath isn’t worth a rhetorician’s fart, they’d cut your throat or sell you in an eye-blink, and then we’re stuck without you!”

I lifted my sword-hand, and looked at my third finger, feeling my cheeks turning to flame. It is there, is it not, I asked myself; yes, I see the bright hard white, I feel the weight, it’s familiar, I did the Kiss of the Lake; I am indeed a semanakraseye, not a ten-year-old. “You see this?” I said, holding the signet on my curled fist under his nose. “Do you know what it means? It means I need listen to you no more than I need listen to the other two thousand thousand people in Yeola-e. So get in line.” I turned and walked away, leaving his mouth flapping.

Every time he brought it up again, even if more politely, I said, “Chinisa has my appointment book.” Even now, I was thinking, he doesn’t respect me; at least now I have the power to teach him to.

My grandmother said that though Kurkas had always been high-handed, he’d never broken an oath of safe-conduct that she knew of; still, she doubted it would make any difference. “If you must go,” she told me, “make very sure it doesn’t seem you’ve come begging, or we’ll end up being slapped with either tribute or war; if he doesn’t spy weakness his ears in the walls will. But don’t tempt him into treachery with anger, either; make him see the steel in your spine without ever letting the diplomat slip. You know the rule: high stakes, no mistakes.”

But Assembly had enough to say that it lasted for more than a day. That night I read my notes from Jinai’s reading another hundred times, perhaps, straining to glean every slight clue out of the words that I could for as clear and complete a sight of the future as I could, while Fifth smacked his lips and murmured in his sleep beside me. I was going to Arko; Jinai was certain. Yet if I did not write and send the letter, I would not be invited. Would I be called there later, of necessity? Arko-ness was twined with the rest of my life, he’d said; what did that mean?

The whole shape of it was what I had already seen and could not deny: whatever I went through would pay for greater good in the end. In the ancient tale, when the tyrant’s machine-monster, big as the world, finds the warriors, obligation forbids them to flee, but holding their ground against it will be death. So they fly into its face, and because to its builders that was the path unconceived, they win. I had to do this.

And Arko was coming, soon, whatever we did; I’d shied from it, but now I was semanakraseye it made even more sense, everything falling into place like a latch dropping. Whatever my people thought, the time was right, Yeola-e weakened by war and plague and with a new and very young leader.

And I could tell no one, not my grandmother, not my shadow-father, not the other generals, not Assembly, else they’d never allow me to go into the machine-monster’s face, the only way to save Yeola-e from Arko.