88 - How huge is the tale of this empire

Still alive, amazingly enough, we stopped at what I saw, once we went inside, was a tailor’s shop. He looked green, as so often people did when Minis approached them, but I gathered that might be because he had been snappish when the Mahid had knocked on his door when he was closed for Jitzmitthra, not knowing who it was.

I glanced at Skorsas, who looked as if he had died and gone to Celestialis, the place that Arkans believe a soul goes when the person has lived a good life. I tried to pick words out of the fast flow of Arkan that Minis and the tailor exchanged as they drew me into the shop, which was lined with bolts of cloth, spools of thread, parts of garments cut but not yet sewn together, like any tailor shop, except in this one everything was satin, silk, brocade, and gold thread. Of course Minis wanted to dress me from such a place. No wonder Skorsas was all but wetting himself.

Naturally the tailor had wine, and naturally Minis drank it, despite his age. I caught the word for “fighter,” of course, and “dinner,” but little else; it wasn’t simple Arkan they were speaking. Once I was inside and the tailor was measuring me, then holding up various bits of cloth on and around me, I started hearing the words for colours, and knowing I’d got them right by the fabrics he was holding. Skorsas was deciding, I realized, what my colours would be. Better I die than say blue and green. In the end it was black, gold and an eye-burning scarlet, my protests that it was too bright going unheard. Worst was when Skorsas took a bit of gold wrought in the shape of a leaf, and twined it in my hair above my temple. “I’m a Yeoli!” I said to Minis. “I don’t wear metal jewellery!” He ignored me as if I hadn’t spoken.

Then it occurred to me that the more spectacular a peacock they made me into, the better the disguise. Who would expect a semanakraseye of Yeola-e to be accoutered like this?

I left the tailor’s with my hair gold-dotted and the rest of my body wrapped, presumably artistically, with swaths of red, gold and black satin. Minis was bored and hungry, I gathered. We took to skates and fast chairs again.

All Arko, it seemed, was having a water-fight. No one dared sling bucketfuls at Minis or his whizzing parade of an entourage, but they seemed to be sparing no one else. A Jitzmitthra custom, I gathered. This was the sixth day and thus the last. Now as we passed the astounding statues going the other way, people were clambering over them to scrub them with brushes and soap-foamed water. Cleansing away Jitzmitthra, or perhaps all of the year that ended today, to purify Arko for the new? There are certain things which, if they continue, will keep Arko from ever being pure, I thought.

Ahead was a building I couldn’t have imagined, let alone had seen before: a tower of white and grey marble, that flared from a narrow base like a giant elongated mushroom, its curving roof and walls made entirely of panes of perfect Arkan glass, topped with a golden spire which, if I’d been anywhere but Arko, I would have thought suggestive of the male member. We rolled to a halt under a magnificent old chestnut tree near its base, Minis paid and dismissed the chair-bearers, he and the Mahid exchanged faibiskitzai for the soft shoes that Arkans wear indoors, and they, Skorsas and I passed through a pair of sliding doors gold-trimmed with ornate curlicues in the Arkan style. I knew he was again thrilled to the bones and playing blasé.

We went into a small room lined with velvet-cushioned seats, where a man in matching velvet bade us take them. I saw no other entrance, let alone stairs. “We’re going to eat at Feliras’s Glory,” Minis told me. “Up there.” He pointed through the ceiling. “No stairs…” He grinned the grin of a child itching to see how a grown-up will take what he shows him. “Just wait.”

The man in velvet rang a brass bell and closed the doors, and I saw there were two sets of them, inner and outer, the inner ones carved in low relief with a chestnut tree stylized in the Arkan way. Suddenly the whole room jolted slightly, like the inside of a carriage just beginning to move; my first thought was earthquake, and I braced myself, but as neither Minis or the Mahid or even Skorsas seemed to take any notice of it, I made as if it were nothing to me too. In that way, Arko was getting into me already. I could feel the room was lifting us, somehow being conveyed smoothly upwards.

It lurched still, and the man in velvet, the only person I’d ever seen wearing clothes meant to match furniture, opened the door again. We walked out into a dome-ceilinged room that was all glass, showing the view from high of the city, and gold-leaf wrought in such a riot of elaboration it was beyond excessive into wondrous. Each table had a pristine cloth, whose corners were tucked into the collars of each diner so as to protect his or her priceless clothes, and all the vessels and utensils were wrought of glass. None but the richest ate here, I saw, by the brocades and satins and gems. They all unfastened the cloths and leapt up to make obeisance to Minis, and he greeted many of them familiarly.

A middle-aged server of elegant mannerisms held our chairs out for us, and tucked the corners of the table cloth under our chins, doing his best with me by wrapping it around the thong of my father’s wisdom tooth. He offered me a polished wooden stand, and Minis said, “For the sword.” Finally, something Arko and Yeola-e shared: the notion that it is not polite to eat armed in a peaceful gathering, at least here. I unslung Chirel and racked it, and a man I knew by his clipped hair was a slave offered me a bowl of water to wash my hands in, bowing obsequiously, as if I were not just as much a slave as he.

I realized, as I bore witness to the ethic that rules all in Arko, that holds who is better than whom as the most vital concern, pervading every moment, every motion and, as I’d learned, every word, that being entirely outside of all of it was a freedom Arkans could never know. I suddenly knew that every person here but one envied, though none would ever show it. In fact perhaps even Minis envied it too; revered without accomplishment, and thus burdened so heavily with expectation, was he truly free?

I had been what he was, the next head of state, in a Yeoli way, but that had not kept anyone from treating me as a child, needful both of love and teaching, for all I’d tried to grow out of being one as fast as I could. In that embrace, I had been free to be one. I had never known until now how utterly I’d taken it for granted, and what a blessing it had been for me.

In Feliras’s Glory, the air was scented with a mix of sweet incense and aromas from the kitchen that were deliciously unfamiliar. Made of glass set between slender pillars, the walls allowed a view of the city and the haze-blued Rim far beyond that took one’s breath away. Feliras’s Glory is fairly near the Marble Palace, and so I saw it close for the first time, a building of pure white marble as large as a small city in itself, turreted everywhere with gold, set high against a cliff that has the gold-leafed eagle emblazoned on it, so wide from here you have to turn your head to see all of it.

How many millions of people slave for this splendor, I thought, paying with their sweat and health for this beauty that they are forbidden ever to see? What amount of blood, from the westernmost reaches of the Empire where it touches the great ocean, to its eastern borders and bases, underwrote all this gold? How huge is the tale of this empire, written across such huge distances, and down so many centuries—and how brutal? To be outside of it suddenly seemed unreal, even wrong, as if every person on the Earthsphere who had a heart should somehow have a part of it.

I looked at Minis, who glanced only for a moment at the gold-edged paper plaque the server held before him—Arkan restaurants list the fare on these, rather than a chalkboard on the wall—clearly knowing well what was on it. “Try the golden-tailed fish for the fish course,” he suggested to me. “It’s in a citrus sauce, very good.”

“I have no knowledge of fine Arkan food,” I said. “Order it for me and I’ll eat it.” Someday, perhaps, I would describe to him what warriors on campaign eat and which I therefore had got used to. He ordered for all of us in fast Arkan, and the food came, dish after dish of things the like of which I’d never seen, let alone tasted: tiny fish somehow cooked so that the skin was crisp and exotically-spiced, beef that was so tender it seemed to melt in the mouth, shell-fish I did not know, subtle chilled vegetable soups, plates full of tiny single morsels drizzled in sauces of every colour and an array of flavours greater than I had known could exist.

But Minis himself had to wait; since Arko, like Laka, has such a long and venerable tradition of Imperators being poisoned or otherwise assassinated, an Imperator’s food is always tasted well before he eats it, and that custom extended even to the heir. “Go ahead, eat, eat,” he urged Skorsas and me, as one of his Mahid took half the double-portion he’d taken onto his own plate. We drank several wines, none any less complex and ancient in taste than the white one we’d had at the Pikeras Fokas. The sweets that were brought afterwards beggared belief.

As we ate, Minis began pointing out sights of the city to me, all of them distant and low as if we were birds: the Great Temple, an enormous stone block not much less tall than our tower, the fountain of Ten Ankelais, whose statues looked so light and full of motion that it seemed impossible they could be made of marble and not living white flesh, the Glass Eagle, atop its spire. It strained my belief that people threw things in the attempt to break it often enough that there was an arrest every few years, as he told me; why destroy something so beautiful? When I asked him he said only that it must be hatred for authority. For tyranny, I thought. In that way Arkans were human.

I finished with the thing that perhaps amazed me the most here: a cup of perfectly good ezethra, no different than you could drink anywhere in Terera. Then Minis sent Skorsas back to the Mezem, and took me to the Marble Palace. He had described the rules of the classic Arkan game faibalitz, which is played on skates such as his on—he claimed—a floor made of steel. I’d shown my disbelief and so, he’d said, I must see the one in the Palace.

As we drew near to its staggering marble heights, we came to a new statue in progress, wooden scaffolding all around it, though since it was Jitzmitthra, no sculptors were working on it. It showed a man of heroic build with a hand raised as if holding a sword, which would clearly be added later. His face was glancing back over his shoulder and his mouth was open, as if caught in the moment of commanding his followers, “Onward!”

“A new statue my father commissioned,” Minis said idly, as he skated and I was carried past it. “Him when he was young, leading the revolt against my grandfather.” Arkans consider Lakans lower than low, due as much as anything to their dark skin; they’d hate to hear, I thought, how similar they are in what is inside the skin.

I doubted Kurkas was built quite like the statue, even as Minis said, “The sword isn’t there yet, but that was when he could actually wield the Imperial sword, once he seized it.”

“He can’t any more? Why not?” I asked, as if just in idle curiosity.

“Oh, he’s past all that warrior nonsense, he says. It’s for younger and more slender men, and too much work, he says.” Interesting to know.


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This scene from Minis's point of view, here (tailor's shop) and here (Feliras's Glory).