80 - How people really are

I shut myself in my room, wanting to see no one, though I’d have to come out for the noon meal, with the other greenhands. I wondered if I could get Skorsas to bring my portion to me here, so I wouldn’t have to see their faces, and they wouldn’t have to see mine. Someone pulled on the door-handle instead of tapping civilly as Skorsas and Iska both did.

“Pardon me, wrong door,” I said, assuming it was another greenhand who’d got his doors mixed up, and hoping he understood Enchian; though the two men with weapons, each carrying a knife and a blow-tube with a dart already set in it, were odd. Weapons weren’t allowed in here. “This is Karas Raikas’s room.”

“I know you’re in there! Let me in!” The voice was that of Kurkas’s son. In some places, it seemed, he took an escort. What struck me was how absolutely still they stood. “I can’t keep bellowing through this stupid door, open it for me!”

“Why should I do that?” Abase yourself or don’t let him notice you, Iska had advised; the latter was clearly out of the question, but I didn’t feel lik doing the former. He got too much abasement; let him see what it was like to be treated as people usually are, as he never had been, obviously, in his life.

“I want to talk to you! I’ll have my Mahid break it down.” So that’s what his escort were; no wonder the stillness.

“Have your Mahid break it down? What for? Why don’t you just ask?”

“It’s stuck!” he shrilled.

“It’s locked,” I said. Iska had given me a brass key that was in the drawer, since I didn’t have so much as a pouch to carry it in. “As I undersand it, this room has been given to me as mine, so only I may enter it, or other people I choose to invite.”

“Well unlock it and choose to invite me, right now! There, I asked.”

“That wasn’t asking.” Had no one ever taught him even the rudiments of manners? If not, it was something I couldn’t blame him for.

“What, didn’t I say it right in Enchian? My tutor says I speak it well.”

“Do you not know the difference between a request and a command?” I asked sincerely, not sarcastically; he really might not. There was a silence that suggested so. One of the Mahid asked him something in Arkan; I caught the word for door. I suspected he was asking if he should break it down.

“A command is: ‘Unlock it and choose to invite me, right now!’ A request is: ‘Karas Raikas, I’d like to talk to you, may I come in please?’” I had just been starting to teach Fifth “please” and “thank you.” The thought of him sent a pang through my heart like a sword.

“Karas Raikas, I’d like to talk to you.” He said it with no feeling, but by rote, like a child rattling off poetry whose thunder he doesn’t understand the words enough to hear. But he’d got the letter; maybe he’d get the spirit later. “May I come in, please?”

“Well done.” I opened the door and welcomed him in with my arm, while the Mahid stood like pillars. They wore identical black tunics, trousers and shining black leathern boots, their belts adorned with a simple silver buckle polished to gleaming, their blond hair bound back in braided clubs with not a strand out of place.

Kurkas’s son was no less jeweled than when I’d seen him last time. His hair fell in a mane like a silver cataract, hanging past his waist; his eyes were all the more astonishing in their blueness close up. How many generations had his ancestors been breeding for these things? His lips had less of the petulant curl I’d seen in the testing-hall; now he was looking up at me, he couldn’t look down his nose.

“There’s supposed to be something I say, isn’t there, when someone says ‘well done?’ I think my nurse tried to tell me but I don’t remember. Or when someone does something you like?”

“You can say ‘Thank you,’” I said. Could he truly not know that? Of course, if no one had taught him, or not enough, it was possible. I had to keep reminding myself.

“Oh, that’s right. Thank you.” When I thought about it, probably his father never thanked anyone for anything. Why would he need to?

“You’re welcome.” It occurred to me that this might just be a new game to him, that he would soon grow bored of. He was intelligent, I could tell, and such children bore quickly. But I remembered something my mother had said, when I’d come to her for advice about Fifth; “Kids buck the rules, but in their hearts they want them, because from what you teach them, they learn who they are.” My mother; I felt another pang as I imagined her thinking of me.

“Have a seat,” I said to Kurkas’s son. “If I had tea, I would offer some.” He plopped down on the bed, the stones and baubles and charms all over him jingling. I wondered how much it was all worth. I was the last person in the world, of course, to have an eye for that. He glanced around the plain, rough room in passing, obviously having seen the like before. I wasn’t the first ring-fighter who’d fascinated him.

“I can get them to get some,” he said. He rattled off something in Arkan, and one of the Mahid smoothly went. Skorsas came faster with a tray than I’d thought possible. Of course it wasn’t Yeoli ezethra but some Arkan concoction. How long would it be, I wondered, before I tasted ezethra again? “You know, I like that a lot better than the noise and mess when doors get broken. It makes people really run around and yell.” Almost absently, he got up and kicked the door shut, right in the face of the Mahid who’d fetched.

If I was going to teach him, I was going to teach him. “Why did you do that? He did what you asked.”

“Did what? Oh, the Mahid? He’s supposed to do what I ask. Did I say something rude?” Again he strained for distantly-remembered words, and came out with them as devoid of feeling as a rote piece. “Sorry, I did not mean to offend you.”

“You didn’t offend me. You slammed the door in his face. How do you think that made him feel?”

“Mahid don’t have any feelings, their whole life is only what my father wants. You think I should practice being polite to them?”

“You should be polite to everyone. Why wouldn’t you be? Why wouldn’t you want to be, at least when you’re not out of sorts?”

“Because it’s all just fake. Even when everyone else is polite to me, they’re scared and hate me. Of course they think I’m stupid too, that I can’t see it.”

I was stunned to silence for a moment. Utterly matter-of-factly, he’d said these words, that contained worlds of anguish. No wonder he has such a name for a hellion, I thought; he’s at war with the world.

“If you are good to them, they won’t hate you.” In this place that was so strange, was this even true?

“It makes me angry when they’re false like that.” He picked at his priceless clothes, something I would have been corrected on, even though my clothes had always been much more modest. There was something else about him that had seemed out of place from the start other than his stunning excess of jewelry, and now I realized what it was: he was the only Arkan I’d ever seen who didn’t wear gloves. His little hands were naked except for what must have been twenty or thirty rings.

“You know, we’ve never been properly introduced,” I said. Again the formal words were awkward for him. He granted one major dispensation from the rules as Iska had taught me, though; when I asked him what he preferred to be called, as I had always been taught was most polite, he said just, “Minis.”

“So if people were not false,” I said, when we were done with that, “if they called you down honestly for being impolite when you are, what would happen?”

“I don’t know. No one calls me down. My father just laughs and says, ‘Let the boy alone, he is so like how I was! Let him learn how people really are!’ Or something else like that. He doesn’t care what I do as long as it doesn’t bother him.”

So clearly, children can see their curses. More worlds of anguish and years of yearning, which for a child stretch so eternally long, lay in these words. I’d lost respect utterly for Kurkas’s way with foreign affairs already; now I lost it utterly for his child-rearing, too.

“With something you don’t know, you can learn by imagining it.” Best thing of all for him to learn: a little chiravesa. “See this in your mind: you slam a door in someone’s face and he says angrily, ‘Hey! What’d you do that for?’ What then?”

“I’d be mad at him.”

“What would you do?”

“Set my Mahid on him.”

But you didn’t set them on me. I’d already calculated in the back of my mind that I could probably take both his Mahid so long as I allowed neither to get off a shot from his tube, but of course there were plenty more where they had come from.

“So you’d set your Mahid on someone for speaking his true feeling. And you wonder why people are false, and why they fear and hate you?”

“Oh.” He stared at me for a moment, then cast his eyes down. “I guess that’s not so surprising… um… my Mahid are like the rudeness I’m carrying with me; I guess I’ve been using them like that.” His hand went over his mouth, making him look the closest to feeling shame that I’d seen.

“You don’t need to.” As far as I know; did what I was always taught was common to all humanity apply to Arko, or to him?

He looked up, brightening a little. “I guess not. But… if I was always polite and so people got to like me, I’d have to be careful that my father never found out.”

It was like creeping through a narrow cave-passage that, at the next step, opens into a huge cavern, so that sounds suddenly echo, and the light of your torch doesn’t begin to touch the blackness all around you. “Really? Why is that?”

“I’m not supposed to love anyone but him.”

I felt a shiver inside, as if a tendril of darkness had touched my shoulder. A thought for my own sake poked through: How much trouble would I be in, if Kurkas found out he’s told me this? I had no idea. For all I knew, he cared not a whit. “What happens if you do?”

“They vanish. I don’t know where they go.” He stared at me, suddenly dismayed. He’d come to love me, in his way, as children can do, so immediately. “I can do a really good job of being rude to you if you think it would be safer.”

I’m a stranger here, I know nothing, you are the one who knows, I wanted to say. “Your Mahid—do they understand Enchian?” Surely they must not, if he was speaking so freely, but I wanted to know; it could be because he was a child and had forgotten he shouldn’t.

“No. Only the First and Seconds of the Mahid and maybe some on the edges of the Empire. They aren’t to be exposed to the corrupting influence of a foreign language.”

“Well, best if you are rude to me when people are listening, then,” I said. “I like you, but I’m in enough trouble as it is.”

“Trouble? No. I know you’ll make fifty. You like me?”

--

[This scene from Minis’s point of view.]