96 - My heart's brother

One night, a little later, I lay awake with something Azaila had once said echoing in my mind. “To kill without anger is not natural to humanity. So it takes that which all unnatural acts take, to commit: will.”

By will, I had to master the truth, that I was fighting for Yeola-e here. I began to form the thought-strategies, to decide the things I could allow myself, and forbid myself, to think when I entered the Ring. Outside as well; it was going to take will also to remain myself, doing what I was doing.

I started a regimen as well: to meditate twice every day, morning and night, imagining myself in the shrine of Vae Arahi, Assembly Palace and the Hearthstone Dependent, all three, and to imagine myself speaking to those I loved. Even though I was learning to speak Arkan and Arkan was all around me, I would keep thinking in Yeoli except when I was thinking in Arkan. I would study Arko as an outsider studies it; as I’d suspected, by the sheer size of the city, it has the most astonishing libraries—canyons, seas, edifices of books—including more in Enchian than you’ll find in Yeoli in the libraries even of Tinga-e and Thara-e. What I chose to study first, until I ran out of works on it, was Arkan strategy and tactics, first in Enchian and then in Arkan, once I learned to read it well enough. I could see myself having use for that knowledge in the future.

Finally, I would not give up on escaping. After some hard thinking—a child’s implausible thinking can draw you in, if you are not that far from childhood yourself, and it concurs with your own desperate wish—I made myself face up to the fact that I could not pin my hopes on Minis. He was a child. He had such power that if he truly tried, he could get me out in a moment, but he had instead latched onto me and was desperate not to lose me, and would put himself before me as children do. If I leaned harder on him to spring me, he’d see me as just one more grown-up betrayer, and turn on me.

But there were other ways. By now I had learned that enough goods were forbidden to be removed from the City that smuggling was a profession; wave enough gold under one of these men’s noses, I knew, and he’d be willing to smuggle a person. I worked on finding the connections.

I did not carve a tally on the wall of my room, but I did carve my Arkan initials, K.R., the Yeoli date I’d arrived, and, in irony, I suppose, the sign of peace, that I had been wearing around my neck when I’d set off for Arko.

†

Four days after my fifth fight, I saw from the training ground, as one often did, two slavers coming along the colonnade with a new man in chains. My sparring-opponent could have whacked off my head without my noticing, and almost did; I’d never thought to see that jaunty style of walking again. It was Mana.

I ran away from my man, so the thicket of fighters was between the colonnade and me, then when he chased me, let him throw and pin me under him. He must have wondered how he did it so easily. If Mana saw me, the first thing he’d cry out would be my real name.

When I’d tapped out and gotten up, he was gone into the Hall of Testing; he’d be back out again, I could not know precisely when. The punishment heavier than push-ups but lighter than a flogging is being expelled from training; a fighter who does not keep his edge in practice is likelier to lose. I stayed lying in the dirt. Koree could smell laziness as a buzzard can meat, and because there’d been whispers that I was his favorite, he was hard on me, so as to prove otherwise. In an instant he swooped. “What’s this, think because great promise you can sleep in training? Fifty push-ups, cockerel.”

“Fik you, Koree,” I said. Thrusting his finger towards the door like a spear, he barked “Out!” It was such a useful expression.

“What in Hayel”—the place where Arkans who have lived badly go after death—“did you do that for?” said Skorsas, when we were in my room. I could think of nothing else, but to be honest.

The loyalty to me his position required had always been faultless; I’d comforted him in his grieving several times again as well, so, as far as I could tell, he’d ceased hating me. He’d been particularly kind after I’d been beaten; when I had screaming nightmares he’d come and hold me, taking my head on his shoulder. Now I decided to truly trust him.

Because the matches are not always made by pure chance—I’d heard by now how two high-chainers won’t get matched against each other for months, until, coincidentally, one’s fiftieth fight—fighters do not befriend each other. If two have a feud, they’ll invariably be matched, for the crowd loves a grudge; if two are known friends, it’s just as inevitable, for the crowd loves tragedy.

“That Yeoli…” I said to Skorsas.

“I perked my ears,” he said, or words to that effect. I could understood about half of his Arkan, now, which made it possible to understand all if he was patient enough to repeat much. “His name is Mannas Something-I-Forget. He looks really good, everyone’s saying he reminds them of you.” No surprise; we’d had all the same war-teachers. “But he’s something political, so they put him in the cells, and I bet he’s off to the Marble Palace for a prick of truth-drug sometime soon.”

My heart came to my throat; what if he had caught a glimpse of my hair or my hand, which he’d know? But that was before he’d gone into the Hall of Testing. He must have answered honestly about why he was in the Empire, I thought, as he did his name; he wouldn’t have, if he’d known I was here.

“He knows me,” I said. “If he sees me he might say my name out. My real name.”

“Shit of the Gods,” Skorsas breathed. “You’re not something political, are you, Jewel of the Mezem?” He’d started calling me that. “Fikket, you could be the missing king of Yeola-e, and then I’d land in the shit—I don’t want to know!”

I just said, “Will you watch him for me? See when they take him to drug him?”

It was that evening, at dinner hour. He was gone for three beads, by Iska’s bead-clock, on which the Mezem runs. I ate in my room, putting out the story that I was in a mood. Even afterwards, I saw, it might not be safe to see him; he might be questioned again.

Skorsas spied for me. Mahid had taken Mana, and they did not announce their intentions; but he said, “He got truth-drug-scraped, I’m sure. People who’ve had it done always look like someone did a grape-pressing dance through their insides… it means, they fill you with the drug, then ask you, ‘What would you least’—oh, you know about this?” I had never shared with him, how Koree had talked me into fighting, and didn’t now.

Scraped is a good word, I thought. The sight came to my inward eyes of the inside of a skull cleaned raw, and I turned it away. Yet if they did that, they’d likely not do it to him again. He didn’t know all of Yeola-e’s most delicate military secrets off by heart.

I waited till late, slipped by Iska’s desk when he was looking through his phial-drawers, and gave the cell-guard a length of silver chain Skorsas had given me. Beyond the window bars of the one locked cell it was pitch-dark; but I knew his breathing.

“Mana.” He moaned; sheets rustled. “Mana. Heart’s brother. Don’t say my name.” I had to raise my voice a little higher. “Mana, chen. Give me your candle and don’t say my name, that’s an order.”

“All right, all right, Che—milakraseye,” he murmured, heaved himself to sitting and fumbled on the cell’s night-table. “You and your cursed mysteriousness… here.” I lit it from a wall-torch, gave it back through the bars.

He had two moons worth of beard, and his hair was hacked off, of course; otherwise he was just the same. Tears stung in my eyes. Now it came to him where he was, for his face went pale enough to see even in candlelight as his eyes fixed on me. I wrapped my hand around his where it clutched a bar, as I had Sakilro’s. “Don’t say my name.”

“Saint Mother,” he whispered. “Sweet Saint Mother help us.”

“They don’t know who I am,” I said. “That’s why I keep telling you not to say my name.” We clasped wrists and pressed our brows together, the best we could do through bars; the guard, who was one of the kind ones, was looking the other way.

“Mana, heart’s brother, you’re alive, I thought you were dead! What happened?”

“I faked it,” he said. “A kindly Arkan couple took me in, saved me, nursed me, and sold me to a slaver. Their gentleness was an investment, it seems.” I told him my tale, in turn.

When I finished, his eyes were the fierce imp’s I knew. “Another fine scrape,” he said, laughing. “If we could get out of your grandmother’s reach when we hit the back of her neck with that snowball, we can get out of this.” Nothing in the world could have been more heartening then; it was as if we were on the Lakan border again, in a camp full of friends.

Under truth-drug, he’d told them the truth, of course, that he didn’t know what had become of me.

“Good,” I said. “You don’t know me. You’ve never seen me before, though we got taught the same style, classic Yeoli. For Mezem reasons as well as Yeoli; I know Iska told you they match by lot, but they don’t always.”

His brows twitched. I always wore my crystal and father’s wisdom-tooth outside my shirt, and my chains inside. His hand was on my shoulder; now he shifted it in, curling his wrist around the bar, and fished them up into the light.

What could I say? He was here; he’d been told the rules. To Arkans I could claim I was forced; he was a Yeoli, who knew I’d chosen.

But when his grey eyes flicked up to mine, I found not horror or dismay, but compassion. Of course he knew me better than anyone but my mother. “Don’t reproach yourself. You’re doing right. Yeola-e needs you. Listen to me, Cheng: the people wills. You get that?” I signed chalk.

“I don’t know you,” he said, grinning again. “Who are you?”

“The ebon-curled and smouldering-eyed Karas Raikas.”

“You’re Karas Raikas! All-Spirit! No wonder these people keep saying I remind them of him.” We laughed; then the guard cleared his throat loudly, and we agreed to meet again.

The writers pestered me the next day. “You know him, don’t you, Raikas? You’re both Yeolis.” I answered, “That’s like my saying to you, ‘You’re from Arko? So-and-so is from Arko, too, do you know him?’ There are two thousand thousand people in Yeola-e; do you expect me to know all the other nineteen-hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine-hundred and ninety-nine?” Skorsas and I had been working on large numbers.

His first fight was the same day as my sixth. No surprise, he didn’t hesitate as I had, and won unscathed. I had thought it would be harder to do what I must with him watching, for shame, but found it easier. The facet of semana kra I was now enacting was sharper, and more insistent on my compliance, in the presence of one of those who depended on it.

He got the room across and three down from mine, so I could easily slip him notes. In the forest around the city are private places; in a green clearing one could imagine, if one tried, was in southern Yeola-e, we made our proper greeting embrace, which turned into a wrestling match in the moss.

He showed me the scar Ethras’s man had given him, as spectacular as one will ever see on a body still living; he’d twisted fast enough to keep the below-the-ribs back-thrust out of his entrails, but it had cut a little into his kidney. His benefactors had even paid a Haian to heal him.

We spoke long of the Mezem, comforted each other for our slavers’ torments. “Don’t let this claw you down, Chevenga,” he said, and kept saying the like. “You start sinking into a pit, and I’ll pull you out by the hair with one hand and the balls with the other.”

“Why do you say that?” I said. “Why should you worry more for me than for yourself?”

He pulled me to him, pinned my head against his shoulder. We touched so much, I’m sure, because we were both starved for a friend’s warmth. “I know you,” he said. “Having to do anything you feel stained by, even if you have no choice about it, you feel like a knife in your heart.”

“It doesn’t show then?” I said. “I haven’t changed?”

He said, laughing, “Of course not, you idiot,” and tickled me silly.

“Except for the teeth, that is. Esora-e will turn somersaults over that… Did you lose them in the Ring?” I told the tale of the four guards, then asked him what he meant. “Oh come on, you know! The bristly-nosed old boar couldn’t stand a necklace with metal links on you; what do you think he’ll say to teeth of gold?”

“Gold?” I gasped. Skorsas had arranged everything with the healer who did dentistry in Arkan too fast to understand; then I’d just sat in his chair, keeping my eyes and mind on anything but what he was doing, as everyone does in a dentist’s chair. It had never occurred to me he might not remake my teeth with ceramic as a Haian would, and I hadn’t looked in a mirror since then, except once in the Legion Mirrors, with grit teeth and closed lips. “Kyash,” I said. “This is Arko!” I turned to the sun, grinned and held my hand where it should reflect; sure enough, there was a golden shine on my fingers.

In the image of their desires, I thought, they will remake me. But this time Mana of the earthly and simple was there, to see the overblown thought on my face and cut it short. “See?” he said. “You’re taking too much on your shoulders, right now, Fourth Chevenga. So you look rich in Arko, where money’s everything, and Esora-e will hop when you get home—so what? You can always get them done over.” I contritely signed chalk.

Yet one thing never came up, under that sweet warm sky, that day: that we might be matched against each other. Neither of us could bear to mention it, I suppose, because, other than pretending we were strangers, or escape, there was no plan to be made against it.

--

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95 - The wind in the stands

Before I got to the Mezem, I never dreamed I’d see anyone do what everyone there does: light the end of a small paper tube with something in it that burns, put the other end to their lips and draw the smoke into their lungs—willingly. Even Minis, all of eleven, did it. Most of my life I’d thought that smoke in the lungs was a means of death.

More recently, I’d heard of Arkanherb, and how you indulged in it by somehow breathing in smoke; the altered state, I had deduced, was from bringing oneself near to death. But the fighters and the boys and Iska and Koree all pulled on these things, with a kind of desperation, so frequently that the whole place stank. In my room, it was so thick it disturbed my sleep until I got used to it, having seeped into the very stone, it seemed, over centuries. Yet everyone behaved normally, at least for people in Arko.

During a language lesson, I pointed to the one Skorsas was sucking on, and he said katzerik. From a little box that seemed to be gold-leafed, though I hadn’t thought he could afford such a thing, he drew one that was not yet burning and, generous soul that he was, offered it to me. That was the most heart-felt Arkan “No!” I’d voiced to him yet. I swore inwardly I’d never so pollute myself, inevitable though it seemed in this place that seemed little less smoke-begrimed than a house on fire.

Later as I learned more words I was able to ask him why, and he told me that it calmed the nerves. No wonder so many fighters would have one right before going into their gates.

I can’t remember quite exactly when I started, third or fourth fight, perhaps. I couldn’t avoid being polluted by smoke from everyone else’s katzeriks anyway, I reasoned, so I might as well see if it calmed my nerves. It did, and I was soon a slave of the things as well as of Arko, like every other fighter.

The night before my fourth fight, I could not sleep. Skorsas offered me katzeriks, water, wine, Arkanherb (which I refused), sleeping drug (which with the wine should have worked) and a massage, all to no avail. I got up, and committed a child’s act.

I’d been matched against Lobryr Flame-hair, of Kurkania, who had four chains; with a trembling hand I knocked on his door.

“Who the fik is it and what do you fikken want?” he snapped. Not a good start; but I had reason, I felt, to get him out of bed.

“It’s Karas Raikas,” I said quietly, in Enchian. “If you kill me, I will forgive you, since you were forced, same as I. If I kill you, will you forgive me?”

At heart, I expected a tearful yes. As I said, it was a child’s act. Instead, from within came quick footsteps; then the door flew open, and he seized my shoulders and threw me back against the wall.

“Forgive you?” he said in rough Enchian. “Don’t ask forgive you! I going to kill you, hack off your head, lions eat your bones!” I tried to twist free, then nerve-grabbed his hands, and we were fighting, so the guards must pull us apart; this must be saved for an audience. As they drew us to our respective rooms, I heard one say laughing, “Some of them just can’t wait, can they?”

A few other fighters glared from their doors; it was unwritten law not to break each other’s sleep. “Start again, you puppies,” said a cold low voice, “and I’ll disembowel you both.” That was Suryar Yademkin, whose chains were a golden wreath, twenty-seven; one was for Tondias, Skorsas’s dead love. He could say such things.

As I stood in my gate, the Director’s hand on the lever, I set my mind on what Iska and Koree had said. You are killing anyway, even if you get wounded. You are such a good warrior that your country does indeed need you. It was for my people; semana kra. I could follow that mindlessly enough.

I took Lobryr down by running him through the thigh so as to cut a little into the artery, a wound he could survive if the bleeding was stanched and he was taken fast enough to a healer. I was going to put my hand on it myself, but he slapped his own palm against it and drew back his sword, and started screaming bitternesses at me, his twisted face soaked in tears. It would be wrong to repeat what he said, and I have done him enough wrong. What I had done the night before, I saw, had been cruelty.

In the crowd, the kerchiefs showed more red than white. Except when the loser is a favourite, it is hard to know why on one day the wind in the stands seems to blow white, and another day red. The weather, touching people’s moods as it does, seems to weigh on it, as do good or bad harvests; by Mezem legend, Arkans are more merciful in jubilation after a great victory in some foreign war, but plague can put them either way; sometimes they want to share their suffering, sometimes they want to see mercy because they are sick of death. To me, most often, it seemed unspeakably random.

I ached for his forgiveness, wanting to ask again, like a child, but saw how his honour would forbid it, like surrender. He hadn’t let go his sword, and did his best to parry when I came in to finish him, so he died in the satisfaction that he’d died fighting. I had won unscathed, preserving my health.

Men with note-boards chased me almost all the way into the baths, shooting off a volley of questions like arrows. Some even knew Enchian. “Raikas, how’d you do that? Where’d you learn that move? Where were you trained? Aren’t you glad now you changed your mind? Do you think you’ll make fifty? Are you happy you won? What’s your real name? What’s fikken wrong with you that you won’t give us a single fikken answer? We’re your name in town, boy, however little you understand, so smarten up.”

Skorsas treated me like a war-hero returned home. He could now make me understand I was the latest sensation. After I’d sparred Koree, it had been predicted I would be the next great champion; that had faded after my first three fights, but now started up again in earnest.

To leap ahead again, the next day the Watcher of the Ring came out, I set my teeth, and read the Enchian version. I wavered between laughter and nausea. When I found the title, “Luminary to be: Lightning Loner,” I read on, wanting to know who they were touting, until I came to “this mountain warrior, of ebon curls and smouldering eyes,” who was brilliant when he didn’t hold back and get wounded. So that’s what Karas Raikas meant. It was a name a child spoiled into believing he was clever would give; no wonder people bit their lips. Forever after, I always thought of it, when I did, in the Arkan; it retains a certain grace that way, left over from the time I’d not known its meaning.

I was a fascinating creature, I read: mysterious about my true name, objecting so much as to slay the previous objector in mercy, then changing my mind like the wind and putting Koree to shame in the next breath. They spun off all sorts of tales about Yeoli mysticism and how ancient mountain masters could blow down walls with a sharp breath, kill with the touch of a finger and parry swords with bare hands, which I had demonstrated, a little. Some scribbler argued in all seriousness that I’d faked my objection, and even the wounds, so as to conceal my true ability. All agreed that my skill had depths unplumbed, that would be the delight of Arko if I would reveal it in full. It was then I resolved to do the quickest and least necessary in every fight.

Having washed Lobryr’s blood off the surface of me, I got out of the bath and went straight to my room. This time it was beyond weeping: at midnight my hands had not ceased trembling, my insides felt empty as if each organ held only air, and all I perceived seemed unreal, as if I were drugged. As I write, the line of memory is broken; yet I remember my awareness being that way at the time as well, as if parts of me had fallen away randomly, like flesh from a dead man’s bones, or gone invisible, like patches on the skin of numbness that one can recall no cause for, nor even when their feeling went.

That was the first time in my life I feared for my sanity.

I no longer know myself, I thought. Springing out of bed, I went to the Legion Mirrors. Too close to see the line of images, it being hidden behind the one, I examined my own face. It was all there, familiar, Yeoli, the same one the Assembly Palace carver had graven for my official portrait; the eyes looked tired and anguished, but I’d seen that before.

I haven’t changed, I thought, cradling my crystal in my fingers; whatever fix I might get myself in, I am still myself.

That was four fights in: I had forty-six to go, if I couldn’t escape. Thinking that, I understood my fear. If I felt so shaken so soon, how would I bear more than ten times as much again? From then on I knew I would have to do more than trust myself unthinking; I would have to cling, hard, in full awareness, to what I knew.

In the death-hour, I crept out onto the training-ground, where moonlight had softened the harsh hot red-brown of the sand to a misted blue, and cooled it under my feet. Arko’s heat-haze is chilled away on some nights, such as this; the air stands so still it seems to hang like clear glass, and every sound, even quiet footsteps in sand, comes crisp and ringing.

I looked up. The same bright pitted moon shines over Arko and Yeola-e, the same constellations wink down; being familiar, they were a comfort to see. To any eyes that might be up there, I thought, Arkans and Yeolis, and indeed all humanity, must seem one; anywhere on the Earthsphere, even around the other side where All-Spirit knows what kind of people live, any slave torn from any nation can see something of home just by looking up. The thought was comfort in itself. I knelt, and clasped my crystal, and called the God-In-Myself, knowing it was no indulgence this time, I was truly in need. Just enough of the wind and the harmonic singer came to my ears to tell me, “I am here, Chevenga, and it’s all right.”

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94 - The excitement! The drama!

“You’ve got to stop doing this, Karas Raikas,” Iska said, in a voice both gentle and full of import, in the sharing of his wisdom. “It’s bad for your health.” I felt a smile twitching my lips, as any number of retorts ran through my head. I said none of them, though.

“Well, think,” he said. “You think you can survive fifty wounds like these three?”

“No, probably not,” I said.

“I will tell you what people are saying.” Why do you think I give a shit what Arkans are saying? “You’ve got fighting-skill of astonishing excellence—you must have been in the elite of the elite in Yeola-e—so that you could not only make fifty, but probably easily. But you seem not to want it.”

“I don’t want it,” I said. “Have you forgotten, I am not here by choice? All I want is to be away from here.”

“But fighting is the only way to get away from here. I think you are refusing to admit that to yourself, lad.”

Cursed right I am, I thought. I had written that I would do everything in my ability to escape, but it also occurred to me that Artira might send people from Ikal into Arko to help me. Minis might find another way as well. But in the meantime, it was the Ring or death, and perhaps I could not survive twenty such wounds, or even ten. Each time I went into the Ring, I saw, I was forgetting to think of the future, and a semanakraseye always should.

“I can never say that a man is invincible, because… you know. But if you make peace with yourself about killing, you will be as close as a man can get. It’s your only flaw.”

Perhaps those few words of Iska’s show Arko in its truest light better than all this great mass of my words. Here, my humaneness was my only flaw. “I don’t want to make peace with myself about killing, at least this kind,” I said. What’s wrong with you people?

“Then you have to make peace with yourself about dying,” he said. So much easier, I thought, except for that one little detail: semana kra. He patted my unscathed shoulder. “Think on it. You are killing anyway, even if you get wounded.” I couldn’t argue with that, except in my heart, so it came out as tears.

On the way down the corridor, he passed Koree coming the other way. He came in without asking permission. I thought he’d call me a liar again, since I had given my word but wasn’t fulfilling it with all of me, but he said, without saying anything else before it, “There is a truth you have to master. Why don’t you want to kill?” I told him.

“Only for Yeola-e; then the truth you have to master is that you kill here for Yeola-e. It is about the preservation of your life. You are such a good warrior that your country does indeed need you. You know it, Raikas; don’t pretend you don’t.” I did not deny it. “Don’t pretend to yourself it is not true, either.” That was all; he didn’t even wait for me to answer before going.

Just as I was thinking, ‘Good, everyone’s leaving me alone now,’ and then, ‘I should have Skorsas bolt the door,’ another person came in without asking permission: Forlanas Limmen, as I knew now was the name of the Director, followed by an interpreter. Of course the Director was above sitting on the bed of a mere fighter; I’d had Skorsas get a desk and chair for me, so now he slid the chair under himself. The interpreter got to stand.

“You’re not my favourite fighter, for reasons I doubt I need explain,” he said in Arkan, if the interpreter’s work was true. Fik you, I thought. “But still, the Mezem would be impoverished to lose you, so I am taking the trouble to advise you.” Oh, fik you so much. I suddenly saw what he meant by “impoverished”: the more fights a man can win, the more the Mezem can charge for tickets to see him fight.

“Raikas… many people pretend this is not so, but they know it in their hearts: the Mezem… is the true glory of Arko. This place of ours is the true heart of the Empire. What we do here… the excitement, the drama… is the true life-blood of Arko, that breathes vitality into its existence. There are truths that are played out here, on the golden sand; the truths of the Gods, manifest on the Earthsphere. Call it our little secret, the mystery of our guild.” He scraped the chair a little closer, and leaned towards me for emphasis. The bed being next to the wall, I could not push it further away.

“I know you came from nothing, Raikas, that you were living only a barbarian’s life before; but now… you are part of all this! It is yours, this glory, this life-blood! This is the finest thing you could do, the highest you could ever rise! I don’t know what it is that keeps you from seeing it—fear, pain, stubbornness, whatever—but… I see it…” He stared off past and above me, the beady blue eyes in his pasty face filled with wonder. What he declaimed passionately, of course, the interpreter repeated in a drone, that apparently being the Arkan way, an incongruity I’d have laughed at, had I been in a better mood. “I… see it!”

What? What do you see? The voice of my thoughts mimicked his breathless tone. The terror and despair in men’s eyes, the blood on the sand, the rotting gnawed bones? The excitement of pointless death, the drama of agony?

“I see it!” he snapped. “And so you should see it too, so we do not lose you to a series of fool’s wounds. So? Tell me you understand.”

“Tell him I have only one thing to say,” I said to the interpreter. “For which your services are not necessary. Forlanas…” I drew it out long. “Fiiiiiik….. you.”

I’ve been asked many times whether the look on his face was worth what I went through afterwards. I am still divided in myself; if I remember that, the answer is a grim charcoal, but then when the look on his face comes into my mind’s eye, I am laughing all over again, and it’s a resounding chalk. His mouth made a little round circle, and his eyes were circles too, owlish, white all around, for an astoundingly long time.

Then they closed up, into that particular ugliness that is the face of an overweight Arkan full of anger, and he sprang ponderously up out of the chair, stamping, letting out a string of Arkan which the interpreter didn’t translate, but mostly didn’t need to, it being at least half fik, shen and kaina marugh. I also heard the word “flog.”

“Interpreter,” I said. “Tell him whoever’s going to flog me has to come in here and get me.” He said nothing as he followed the Director, but must have translated it outside, for shortly after, four full-geared guards came down the corridor. I got up, grabbed the curtain with its rod off its hooks, dumped the curtain off the rod onto the bed and threw open the door, with my shield-hand. Skorsas screeched behind me, “Why did you say that again!? And what are you doing?”

Mezem guards are not much as warriors, as a rule. I held them at the door, taking one of them down, before the back two thought to slip through Skorsas’s room and then the door that joined his to mine; retreating up onto my bed, while Skorsas retreated into the closet, I took down two more. The fourth ran like a rabbit. With Skorsas shrilling after me, I went into the corridor; a fighter with a swath of chains said drily in Enchian, “Karas Raikas! Don’t you know you’re only supposed to do that in the Ring? Fighting in private is like taking money from the Director’s pocket, you know!”

Of course, they did what I should have known they would: stun-darted me. Hit by such a small thing, no bigger than a thimble, I wondered why Skorsas ran in so fast and grabbed me around the waist, until a bare instant later when I felt a little light-headed, then found I didn’t know up from down, then saw all go black.

I woke up in chains in a cell again. The testers had told me stun-drug leaves a nasty headache; now I found they had not lied. Leaning close over me as if to hide what he was doing, Skorsas lifted my head on his arm and said, “Drink this fast.” It was poppy-juice. I quaffed the cup, and he called to someone else, having orders to do so, I gathered, when I awoke. Two guards dragged me to the training-ground, where a square frame of beams was set up.

No going without bonds by choice for honour in Arko; nor did they worry about re-opening the cut shoulder-muscle, but just tore off the sling to stretch me hand and foot in the frame by my shackles. Koree would do the honours, it seemed; I heard him say, behind me, “Ten lashes, for insolence.”

I laughed it off in my mind. I can take ten in a blink. What I didn’t know was that the Arkan whip is nothing like the Yeoli army whip, which leaves no scar, or the Lakan, that cuts with a fine leather strand. Its tail has ten steel beads in it; sometimes they are round, sometimes sharp with points to pierce and drag through the flesh at every stroke, depending on how much pain the flogger wants to inflict. The Mezem one has points, of course.

Nor did I know that Arkan custom always adds the one extra stroke for assurance of good behavior, so that while I kept my silence through ten, the eleventh caught me relaxed and so flayed a cry out of me. They didn’t unbind me even then; Koree poured a bucket of brine over my back, rubbing it into the cuts around my sides, too, making sure he didn’t miss a finger-width. “It’s to clean out festers before they start,” he said, “so think of me as your healer.” The scars would show as long as I lived.

Even then, it wasn’t over. Four guards took me down from the frame: the three I’d struck down with the curtain-rod, recovered now, and the fourth who I’d revealed a coward, all with dark grins on their faces. No question of me fighting them; despite the poppy-juice, the pain seemed to reach through my back to my lungs so I could barely breathe. I needed their hands to hold me up.

Skorsas followed them as they led me, calling them all manner of names for doing this, until one said something that shut him up fast as a gag; that they’d make me feel every word. They took me to a half-empty storage room, and did not take off their gauntlets. I remember little, only the walls and floor and ceiling advancing and receding, and a front tooth, that I muddily realized must be mine, being crushed on the stone floor before my eyes. “Shh, don’t even try to get up,” Skorsas said to me, when they left the scraps that were left of me to him. He had me carried to the infirmary on a litter.

I jump ahead, so be assured I’ll slip back: from when I was healed enough to walk, every time I walked by their posts afterwards, those four would grin smugly, in pride at having bested one man already incapacitated, I suppose. When the shoulder-wound had healed enough that I was in training again, I challenged them, Arkan-style: a slap across the face with an ungloved hand, no trouble for me since I never wore gloves. All four of them at once, clean blade, I proposed, which would be suicide against people with a shred of skill or courage, so I needn’t worry.

They protested; through a lot of gestures and repetitions and referring through my dictionary as they spoke, I came to understand. They were constrained by their positions not to kill me, while no such restrictions hindered me, which would make the fight unfair. True enough, so I made a gesture which I think is universal, going into stance with two fists clenched before me. They all glanced at each other, then said “Yes.”

Before the appointed time, one of them quit his job and left for Korsardiana on urgent family business. I left the other three each with a gap in his teeth, as they had me, and from then on they were deferential, in that particularly beaten-dog Arkan way.

But as I lay in the bath afterwards, scalding my scraped knuckles, I thought, I’ve been here barely a moon, and have three times as many scars as I did before already; yet I’ve given far worse than I’ve received. Thrust a person into barbarity, and he becomes a barbarian. Suddenly the sight of Assembly Hall and the great crystal in my hand, and my own voice saying, “By the will of the people let this become law” came into my mind. The baths are a good place to weep; you can splash water over your face if someone looks.

--

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93 [July 28] - No more mirrors

“I have to stay away from you,” Minis said. “For a good long while.” Had Kurkas said something? Or had Minis discerned some other sign of danger? I had begun to learn that Arkans have almost a preternatural sense for signs of displeasure from those above them on the enormous hierarchy that rules their lives. For Minis, that was but one, but he’d learned.

“I can’t stay much longer today. I have a competition I have to witness or they’ll be disappointed. My new tutor has a lot of work for me. He’s an old stinker that my father likes.”

“A lot of work is good for you, Minis. You will end up with a better mind for it. But I’ll miss you.”

He stared at me as if I’d given him treasure—or rather, as if he were any other child I’d given treasure; he had so much treasure already, more would hardly touch him. “You will?” he said, amazed. I’d thought we were both clear that we were friends already—even just our headlong journey through Arko on wheels should have been enough to forge anyone on it into friends for life—but he was so unused to friendship, I saw, it hadn’t yet stuck. I resolved to keep telling him.

“Yes, of course,” I said.

He looked away from me, as if unable to bear something so good, this stripling in enough jewels to clothe ten kings anywhere else on the Earthsphere. “I already read half of my tutor’s stupid reading list so when he tells me to read something I’ll have it done already.” So unable to bear it, he had to swerve away from the topic for a bit.

“That much less work for you, then.”

“I don’t want to stay away!” he shouted, then clapped a hand over his mouth, his brilliant blue eyes white all around. “Sorry,” he whispered.

“I know, Minis.” I tightened my arms around him.

“If you need something… just send a note to my chamberlain.” He didn’t tell me how; it sounded too risky anyway. “People are always asking me for things. I already tried—really quietly, don’t worry—to buy you while you’re still a low-chainer. I told my chamberlain I wanted another racehorse and a brace of hounds and a gladiator.”

I froze, my heart coming to my throat. He tried a second way to free me; maybe the next one will work. “You did?”

“Yes. My father told me not to meddle with a money-making scheme. There’s a law; no one is allowed to buy gladiators who aren’t too crippled to fight, or fans would be buying out popular gladiators all the time and then no one else would get to see them fight. But I should be above laws like that, when it comes to you! Well, I am, but he’s above me. I threw a tantrum, but he didn’t care. I have to go. Should I slam your door for you?”

“Minis…” I felt my eyes tear up, as usual. When I looked back at how many times I’d shed them since crossing the border, it boggled the mind. “Thanks for trying. And be careful.” Him throwing a tantrum in front of Kurkas on my behalf was much more of Kurkas’s notice than I wanted. “Definitely slam the door.”

“Is there something you don’t mind me breaking?” he said, calculatingly.

It wasn’t as if I owned anything here, or at all. I quaffed the water out of the Arkan-glass cup Skorsas usually kept filled for me, and handed it to him.

“Thanks,” Minis said.

“You’re welcome.”

His face darkened, taking on the role as he stood up. “Don’t you do that again!” he roared in his piping voice. “You’re my fighter and you are better than that! You fight or I’ll have you flogged to encourage you!” He flung the door open with a bang and hurled the glass through to smash on the corridor wall. “You obey! Or else!!” He slammed the door again behind him.

“Don’t throw things! It’s rude!!” I bellowed through the door, playing my own part.

“YOU SHUT UP!” I heard his stamping foot-falls down the corridor, like thumps on a drum. “You tell Raikas to quit slamming his door, IT’S RUDE!”

†

Wounded on an arm, I could go walking in the City. Though I wanted to go alone—I was reconnoitering ways of escape, of course—Skorsas insisted on coming with me at first. With some effort he made it clear to me it was that I might get lost. As in Tinga-e or Thara-e, knowing where to go in Arko is a matter of memorization, except much more so, since Arko is as big as four Tinga-e’s. At least there is the golden eagle on the cliff to navigate by.

The cliffs of Arko are polished smooth as a dead-still pool, and their bases, all around, are patrolled by guards, lest vandals mar the polish. To climb them was conceivable with pitons, as I had thought out at night, even if one had to drive every one of them into mirror-clean rockface with a hammer. Still, I had no way of getting any—a Yeoli captive entering a shop selling such things could hardly avoid suspicion—and, more fatal to the plan, it would be impossible to do silently.

The lefaeti were well-guarded, as Iska had said. They are worked from the top, and the guards there have a clear view of the bottom, so that if one were to commandeer one, it would not be raised. At night, they are kept raised at a position mid-way up the cliff, even the double ones, and no ropes left hanging.

The other egress is the great corridor bored through the cliff, commanded by the Gate, which is some seven man-lengths high and four wide. At night it is bolted well, from the cliff-side; there are actually two gates, between which is a tunnel and a barracks carved out of rock, where the guards sleep.

Every load that goes out by either way is inspected through and through, sometimes with spear-points; every person must show his bare face and papers. Little trouble, to forge or steal papers; but unless I found a way to turn my eyes blue, they would betray me.

All this I learned in the few days after my second fight. Meanwhile, I lived the Mezem life.

It is a life that etches itself into the mind like a sight seen while in agony, yet seems unreal, both at once; being always near death one’s eyes see everything hard and clear, yet one’s mind is in constant disbelief.

Since one never thinks ahead more than eight days, time slows, sometimes passing like syrup, and indeed loses its meaning, replaced by the number of one’s victory chains.

Other than those of the boys, who are as present and unobtrusive as air, the faces in the quarters are ghostlike for all they appear solid and alive. Most are soon gone, while those that stay are to be feared; the more chains hang around their necks, the deeper death seems worn into their features. I remember thinking, ‘I must not let that happen to me.’

I notice that, writing about the Mezem, I fall into the present tense, as if that time of my life were graven into stone, unchanging, and I were sealed into it forever, as into a crypt. Anyone else who has been through it will understand.

Whatever else your life is, even the demarchy, the Mezem etches itself into the soul, and stays forever. To write of it carries you back, making the present tense seem proper, so I hope my lapses may be forgiven.

Minis, I learned, had granted leave for Skorsas to buy everything he wished in which to dress me, money no object, so he kept taking me into the tailors’ street, an unending look of glee on his face. ‘Why do I resist this?’ I asked myself, gazing at my image in the perfect mirror of yet another tony shop, in a scarlet puff-blouse with sheer lace in front down to the navel, showing my skin just enough to be enticing, as if that person could be me. ‘I am this.’ Right then and there I shouted, as best I could in Arkan, “Dress me however you want, but no more mirrors!” He never pulled me in front of one again, and took the one in my room away when I took it off its hooks. So I became invisible, to myself.

I will write very little of my fights; I’ve described the first two much too much already, considering they were fights that never should have happened, and lives that never should have ended. They have been made too much into public shows already; I won’t lower my reader to the level of the slavering Mezem crowd.

If, on the other hand, you are on that level, there is one collection of scribblings, regularly printed by the hundred on the great Arkan machine, called The Watcher of the Ring. It concerns itself entirely with the Mezem, its doings, and the fights, recounting in relishing detail every one. In old issues, lingering on the shelves of libraries like stains on an artwork, may be found detailed accounts of all my matches.

My third was against a Srian three-chainer named Dinosti. The matches are made supposedly by lot, but everyone knows this is not true, and so I was being honoured, matched against someone with more chains than I. Only one more, though; they were honouring me cautiously.

It was the same as the first and second fights, except this time I got it in the sword-arm shoulder, the sword-tip going in to the bone, giving me a flash of shock bad enough that I didn’t catch Chirel with my shield-hand when I dropped it. I’d played with doing the wrist-parry with no wristlets before, but never in a real fight; now I did, and won at the expense of a scrape.

But he was only stunned; the crowd held up their kerchiefs. Whites and reds were about even, it seemed to me; Minis was in the Imperial Box, but not Kurkas, so it was up to the Director. Our eyes met, and he smiled; here was a way to get even with me. He held up red, and I did what I must. Minis had spoken true; Forlanas could hurt me, and cared not a dust-speck whether he threw away another life to do it.

This time I wept unrestrained, Skorsas wrapping his arms around my head, as Iska stitched me, put my arm in a sling and bandage pinning it to my chest, and said, “Three days in the sling, eight days no training, twelve days no fighting.” Then he gave an order to Skorsas, and I could be proud I understood it: “Once he’s in bed, tell me; I’m going to talk to him.”

He didn’t come up until I was calm, though, the pain-juice dulling the heart-pain as well as the shoulder-pain, and he sat for a while on the edge of the bed, just looking at me, at first. Then he smoothed my forelock, which had grown back a little, back from my face, as my mother had, except with a gloved hand.

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92 - The greatest gift I could ever give

The clinic ceiling was familiar this time, as was Iska’s touch while he stitched me, the sweetness of the Haian remedies and the tang of the poppy-juice. “No straining it for three days, no training for eight, no fighting for twelve,” he pronounced, that too, familiar. Burying my face in my shield-arm, in tears, especially when I got into the bath, was old hat.

“I don’t understand,” said Skorsas, an Arkan sentence I knew well, then a question of which I got the gist: “Why does it bother you so much?”

“The question isn’t why it bothers me so much!” I shouted, my voice breaking. “The question is, why doesn’t it bother everyone else as much as it bothers me!?” Of course he stared uncomprehending, because I’d shouted it in Enchian. It made me feel better, in truth, so I kept going, railing in Enchian while he patted my shoulder, not understanding a word.

Waiting by my door, when I went back up to my room, was Minis, wanting to be close because I’d scared him again. Ixtak, in truth, had never had a chance, from the moment I started fighting in earnest, and in that sense had never had a chance at all. I didn’t want to have the thought, but it was a good thing to tell Minis. Skorsas slipped away obsequiously into his room, and I lay down; with the pain and the drugs and having lost blood, it was good to let my head fall back on the pillow. I’d have preferred to be alone, but Minis had let me write home.

“I have some advice,” he said, and I listened; he may be a child, but he knew his way around here, and I did not. “Forlanas Limmen is an idiot, but he can hurt you.”

“Who is Forlanas Limmen?”

“The Director.”

“Ah. Him.”

“He was going to flog you for being rude.”

“He isn’t?” I’d heard the Arkan word for “flog” among the boys at the same time they’d been casting glances at me and rolling their eyes, Arkan-style.

“No. I told him I didn’t want him to.”

“You interceded for me? But Minis… you were saying, if your father knows you are attached to someone…”

He straightened on the bed, and pursed his lips angrily. “That moron wanted to flog my ring-fighter for rudeness… you, for rudeness!”

“I don’t want to disappear because you and I got too close,” I said. “I was rude, actually.” I told him what I’d said, which he already knew, having asked the Director, but he smirked, for once like an eleven-year-old child, again as I said it. He’d laughed right in the Director’s face when he’d recounted the tale, he told me.

“It’s early enough that you’re still my new toy,” he said. “I can get away with it for a while. But… be careful, with Limmen. He’s touchy about petty things, and flogs fighters over nothing.”

Maybe I should apologize; I considered it aloud, but Minis didn’t think I should. Then his mind flitted elsewhere, as a child’s does. “Have they started digging in the courtyard yet?”

“Yes. Why are they digging?” I had a sudden inkling who’d ordered the work. He was made of money; he could do it. And it would be like him to utterly forget that perhaps he should inform the denizens.

“I saw how you liked my baths, and how the first time you got wounded there were no invalid slings so you couldn’t bathe here. So I’m having new baths built here. For you. Well, all the fighters will be able to use them, but it’s you I’m thinking of.”

I couldn’t speak for a moment, the sense of the unreality of my life surging so strong that I went dizzy. But of course there was a danger. “You… don’t think anyone will figure out it’s for me, and know that I’m more to you than a new toy?”

“No!” He looked crestfallen, and a touch angry, as if I’d spat on what he’d given me. A thought chilled me; if this is what he’d do when I pleased him, what if I ever displeased him? Suddenly I knew how it was for Arkans living under an Imperator. I hadn’t thought I’d ever be angry for them. “I’m a Mezem fan, everyone knows that!”

“But you didn’t do this until now.”

“I want you to have a nice place while you’re here!” he said, defiantly. There was a bigger upset underneath. So I thanked him. I felt it was in true gratitude, but wondered whether in truth I was doing it out of fear. No wonder tyrants can never know whether their subjects’ love is sincere; the subjects might not be sure themselves. It’s one horror atop another, I thought. May I go home? Then I thought, he’s a child. Some things are the same in every nation.

“What’s wrong with the baths? Or me giving you something?” he said, his face turning petulant now. “You want me to tell them to stop?”

“No, no,” I said. “Nothing’s wrong with these things. It’s just that Iska and the Director, from what I can tell, were a touch concerned this morning—”

“Why? I got the best architect.” Of course.

“They just want to know what the plans are.” He looked at me, baffled; of course he wouldn’t understand, how could he? In his world, everyone but one accommodated themselves to suit him. If I explained, perhaps I could teach him something else. “The architect hasn’t spoken with Iska, but Iska would know better than anyone whether everything about it is going to be right for us.”

“Oh,” he said. “Well, that makes sense.”

“You know that when renovating a place in which people live, it’s typical to ask them what they want?”

“Is it being rude not to?” he said, looking ready to be devastated. “I didn’t think of it, does that mean I was being what they call ‘thoughtless’?”

“Well, thoughtless means not thinking,” I said. “But Minis, it’s all right. You’ve never done this before—I assume—and you’re young. You can’t be expected to know everything, you’ve hurt no one, and this one is easy to correct. And it’s such a wonderful favour for all of us, no one will be left feeling badly. When you give, you give large.”

“I have to give gifts—mostly to my father—but I’ve never wanted to give someone something before.” I gave him in return what he wanted the most: a one-armed hug. Such a simple and easy thing—they’d been unlimited when I had been a child—but so huge when it is lacking.

After asking my help wording the note to the architect telling him to confer with Iska, he went downstairs to write it, though he told me people would grow suspicious if he became too polite, so that it would be best if he didn’t apologize for not doing this sooner, as I’d suggested.

“People like things like that, right?” he said, when he came back. “Your boy is happy he can dress you, right?”

“My boy is delighted he can dress me.”

“I wonder what other renovations or things like that I could do? I like doing it.”

“As many as you can afford, I guess,” I said. Iska, I hope you’ll forgive me.

“It feels good, if I do it right... it feels disgusting when I mess it up.”

I tightened my good arm around him. “Disgusting? That’s a harsh word. Don’t be too hard on yourself. Everyone messes up sometimes.”

“I don’t know how to be hard on myself... no one else ever is... so I don’t know if I’m being too hard or not.” Always, I saw, I would hear things from him I’d never hear from anyone else. I am saying ‘everyone messes up,’ I thought, but he is so far removed from ‘everyone’… for all I know, it means nothing.

“Well, if you are very powerful,” I said, “your mistakes will hurt many people. But much more important than feeling bad for making them is being sure not to make them again. And learning how to anticipate how they might, or ask those people a decision will touch before making it… that’s just part of growing up. So you will learn it, but you can’t expect yourself to have learned it all yet.”

He looked at me with his amazing blue eyes burning, in such a way that I knew not only that no one had ever told him this before, but that he hadn’t learned it naturally, as people do. That had to mean that someone was teaching him the opposite. I felt a chill again.

Still, he was taking it in, like a person dying of thirst given water. I had illuminated something already inside him, as a teacher should, making it take shape in his thoughts. I went on. “For an Imperator-to-be, it’s very important, of course. If you mess up, once you’re Imperator, you’ll hurt millions of people.”

He looked a touch worried, about a closer thing. Because he’d never had to learn to school his face, it showed every expression as clear as through Arkan glass. “I don’t think my father would like me learning any of this. He thinks backwards from that.”

Well, there it was. “How do you mean?” I asked him.

“People are supposed to take care of him, not him worry about anybody else. He wants me to know that everyone is here for me to do with as I like, not as they like.” It couldn’t be stated more plainly.

“But he’s Imperator,” I said. “His job is to take care of Arko.”

“Umm, no,” he said. “He just pretends in the Temple. He knows people are for him.”

In for a copper chain, as they say in Arko, in for a gold. “Minis, do you know what taxes are?”

“Of course,” he said, looking a touch slighted, and then rattled off, so that I knew he had memorized it from a text: “Taxes are levied from the people of a city, a district, or a nation to fund the running of the jurisdiction, for the support of the army in its defense and expansion and to present the nation’s face to the hostile world.”

“Exactly. And funding the running of the country includes paying the Imperator to do his work. Everything he has—everything he eats, everything he wears, where he lives, all the maintenance of the Marble Palace—it all comes out of taxes paid by the people of Arko.”

“Don’t forget loot from wars,” he added casually. Of course, how could I forget that? “Keeping him in the style which the society demands, of course… he’s our connection to the Gods.”

“What are they paying him to do?”

He looked at me a bit surprised, having been presented with another thought he’d never had before. “Ummm… he’s just doing as he pleases.”

“For all that money they send to him, what do they get?”

“He sees Himself as the Empire,” he said, a little insistently. “He personifies the Empire.”

“Yes,” I said, “But what do the people get? They maintain him in very good style indeed; why should they?”

He looked touched by that underlying fear again, but this time troubled as well, as if by conscience. “My tutor tells me things... but my father doesn’t believe the same. And mostly he does nothing… but he’s supposed to... supposed to... work. For Arko.”

“Doing what? What is he supposed to be doing for Arkans?” I was thinking of reassuring him that I wasn’t just asking questions, but leading up to something, but thought again. He’s with me. He’s bright enough.

“Well, he does do audiences... and settles some disputes. He represents us to the Gods. My tutor says an Imperator’s job is to administer, to make the difficult decisions that require a quick choice, to oversee the army generals, to make appointments of judges, to approve civil works... hey!” His face brightened in joy. “As I just did! And lots more. But my father doesn’t do any of that, I don’t think… his lessons to me are all how to control people. Like when he made his food taster feed his whole plate to his fool; he didn’t like what the fool was saying. He told me it sent a message to everyone who saw it.” Right, I thought. About as subtle as a club on the head. I heard it with a numbness that disturbed me; I was getting too used to these things.

“Well, the things you’ve told me the Imperator does, and the others you haven’t: they all have one common goal, do you see it?”

“To… work… for the people of Arko... to do all the things they can’t, I guess.”

“To do all the things each person can’t do alone, but all need.” The tutor had started to teach him the letter; no one had taught him the spirit. “He oversees the generals so they’ll win the wars and so Arkans won’t get killed; he appoints judges so they’ll be fair and just in court so no one will be unjustly treated; he does the civic works so that people can make use of them and enjoy them, just as we fighters will enjoy the new baths once they’re built. And so on... it all comes down to the same thing, taking care of the people of Arko. That’s what they pay taxes for.”

“And goes to talk to the Gods because the people can’t, so the Gods will favour them.”

“Yes.” Along the way, studying the Arkan language, I had gathered that Arkans considered only their priests qualified to be at one with the Divine, so that everyone else must beg them to do it on their behalf, and in effect, the Imperator was the highest of priests. There was hierarchy even in this. “Or at least no one person can talk to the Gods on behalf of all of the people, except the Imperator.”

“That’s how he personifies the Empire, I guess,” said Minis. So by using what I knew, I’d got it correct enough—a strange, Arkan-flavoured version of what the semanakraseye does.

“He does for them what they cannot do for themselves individually—you understand what I mean? He should never think of himself as being as large as all his people, because that way lies the madness of supreme vanity; he is but one man, in truth. But he is one who has been given that task. And it is in return for all that tax money, that maintains him as it does. You Arkans forget, but it is an agreement. The people agree to maintain him, and to honour him as Imperator, and in return he agrees to do for them the things that must be done for all at once, so they cannot do them individually.”

“Oh.” He sat silent, brows knit hard, and, without seeming to know it, took one strand of his spun-white-gold hair and started chewing on it, as if it had crept between his lips, as he did when deepest in thought.

“Ilesias the Great wrote things like that, I think,” he said finally. I remembered the name vaguely from a history of Arko; I hadn’t known he’d been a writer too, though. I’d gathered Minis was a bookworm, too; might this send him coursing a trail back into Arkan history, to some less tyrannical time that I didn’t know about, so that it was not only something in him but something in his whole culture that was illuminated? I could hope.

“But a person like that should have control over himself, then, because there’s no one else who could control him,” he said finally, his eyes, whose very blue was piercing, coming out of their reverie and fixing me.

“Yes, at least in Arko. It’s different in Yeola-e.” What would Kurkas think, I thought with an inward chuckle, of his son learning about voting?

“So then why am I being taught I shouldn’t control myself if I’m going to be in that position one day?” he asked me, as if I could know. It was odd seeing such a worldly child revert now and then to being just a child, thinking such things as that every grown-up knows everything. “That’s backwards.”

“Well, just between you and me,” I said, hoping I wouldn’t die for it, “I happen to think that your father does have it backwards. I can tell you that if he were in Yeola-e, if he were the semanakraseye, he’d be in a lot of trouble.”

His face went angry and approaching tears, both at once. “I don’t think I should leave right now,” he said. “It’ll get you into trouble if I look upset... but I just want to run away.”

It felt more as if he wanted to run away into my arms, as kids do when faced with something that seems too big for their smallness, so I took him in again, hard. “It’s okay, lad. You needn’t be upset that things aren’t as they should be now; just tell yourself that whatever is wrong you’ll set right when you grow up.”

“I…” His voice quavered. “I guess. I’m not prepared, though.”

“You’re not grown up. You have plenty of time.” I remembered my mother telling me that when I’d run to her after learning about the Statute semanakraseyeni 21-1 and 21-5-7.

He buried himself in me wordlessly, for a while, and I thought: did I just give the world the greatest gift I could ever give, planting this seed in the mind of an Imperator-to-be? If I die here, can I die knowing that I have done something from which greater good will come than everything I would have done as semanakraseye anyway?

--

This scene from Minis’s point of view.

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