89 - A fallen people, whose ancestors came from the sky

The Marble Palace palsies the imagination, let alone the words. I had not thought it possible for a building to be so opulent both in materials and in craftsmanship. Had slaves been so forced, or had it been, as it looked, built by people who put their hearts into it?

It is, as its name suggests, marble inside and out. White marble is the basis from which everything else extends, but there marble of every imaginable colour: black, water-turquoise, pale green, golden-brown, pink, even an astonishing purple which I since learned is only to be found in one outcropping in the world. Fluted columns leap to distant gold-crusted ceilings, their crowns and the wall-trim gold-leafed; marble stairways flow up in curves like waterfalls and flames; windows and skylights are lace-works of glass; everywhere are carved arabesques, stylized leaves, flowers, and the curvaceous running-patterns that are the style of Arko.

Around every corner is another staggering piece of artwork, either a statue carved and painted so real it seems frozen in its action, and will continue the moment you look away, or a painted mural that seems like a view through an Arkan glass window into its own world. There are many portraits, some of old Imperators or other members of the Imperial family, some of people, nine in ten of them men, who were notable in Arko in some other way.

I would not have thought there could be so many riches in all the world; of course, all the riches of the world Arko has taken, I thought, come here.

Minis had dismissed his Mahid the as soon as we were inside, so I alone followed him down the ostentatious corridors. He took me into what he told me were the Lesser Baths, flinging off clothes and jewels as he went; someone else, he assured me, would pick them up, that being their place, not his.

We went through another double set of doors, dark wood and then glass, which made me wonder if we were entering another lefaetas, until I saw inside. It was a bath-chamber of blue-green marble and gold, large as the hall of any town hall in Yeola-e, with three pools of water: cold, tepid—as large as a small pond—and hot, with bubbles churning so that it looked like it was boiling. He assured me it was not; the bubbles were from a purposeful disturbance of the water, since water-currents are soothing, he told me. It ran, like so many things in Arko, on the force of water making the great drop from the top of the Rim. The marble ceiling was domed like the inside of a cave.

Naked, he flung himself into the shallow part of the largest pool, inviting me to follow, at least if I wished to; his father, it turned out, was deathly afraid of water. I had not been swimming since I’d left Vae Arahi, so I stripped and flung myself into the deep part.

A Yeoli child would feel ashamed not to be able to swim at age eight, let alone eleven, but he could not; I remembered from Ethras that Arkans consider swimming base and shameful. Of course Minis’s white-gold hair, that fell down to his calves, was a danger, entangling his limbs badly enough that I had to rescue him on the steps.

When I asked him why he didn’t know how, he said his father did not approve, being so afraid himself that to bathe he would have himself carried into the water by several servants in an invalid-sling, threatening them with death, if they went too fast, every finger-width of the way. But Minis didn’t seem afraid of water, so I asked him if he would like me to teach him, as my parents had me and I would Fifth when he was old enough. He was a little nervous and awkward, but eager.

When he’d had enough, he went into the hot pool, bubbles roiling up all around his small fat body, and I swam the length back and forth at speed, to work my muscles. I was still off training, but this couldn’t be called that, I decided, especially since I wasn’t putting weight on the leg.

“Raikas?” He was calling me; I heard as I stopped to turn at one end. “Have you written home to let your family know you’re alive?”

I stopped short and stood up in the water. Slaves don’t write home to let their families know they’re alive, as a rule. There is no slave-owning culture whose owners or overseers permit it. Did he not know that? I had been told by Iska it was strictly forbidden; we’d be flogged and the letter burned.

“I know you want to keep it quiet who you are,” he said, making my heart clench in my chest. “If you write it here, tonight, I can slip it into the Marble Palace mail, and no one will ever know.”

My heart ceased clenching, and started pounding. Artira… Mama… shadow-father… To them I was missing, and likely dead. No matter if it’s a child’s whim; they’ll know just the same as if it were not. It began writing itself in my mind. Whatever they tell you, don’t necessarily believe it… stall… prepare for war… Foreign news doesn’t come much to the Mezem, from what I could tell, though you’d think it would, since the Mezem is full of foreigners; no one read much of the Pages at all except the parts about the Mezem, and I hadn’t seen a recent Pages at all; of course I’d arrived just in time for a festival in which everyone forgot all worldly cares, not to mention work.

Still, if I addressed it to my family and it were intercepted, even if I didn’t sign it or signed it falsely as Rao Kyavinara, it might earn me a truth-drugging, and then all was lost. “No one will question who this letter is from?” I asked him casually, doing my best to seem more calm than I was.

“No. Mail to all over the world goes from here. If it were sent from somewhere in the city, it might be looked at; but no one touches mail from the Marble Palace.”

I grabbed his hands and kissed them, in gratitude, forgetting he was Arkan; he flinched as if my lips had been red-hot, so I had to apologize. “It’s all right,” he said. “Come.” By the bath there were linen robes, and he seized a small one for himself and handed me a large one, then took me to a sitting room with a desk in an alcove. “There’s a pen and paper.” An Arkan pen, of course, which caught me off-guard even again, so excited I was.

I’d thought out how to do it as we’d walked from the baths to here, so I sat down and wrote it out fast, the outer letter in Enchian, addressed to Ivahn, Benaiat of Brahvniki, the inner one in Athali to Komona’s father.

To my grandfather:

I will always fondly remember the days of my youth spent with you, particularly those in the establishment of the tangled lengthy creature. I beg of you, as I have come to misfortune, to forward the enclosed letter to Terera as per its address, to my other kin, so I may let them know I am alive and what has happened. I will be forever in your debt.

I look forward to further pleasant times together, my beloved grandfather.

As ever, your grandson
Vik



Sanalai Shae-Ranga-e, 19th On Linden Lane, Terera

Dear Sanalai:

As one who is a friend of your eldest daughter I ask that you show this to her so she will know my writing, and know to show it to my sister. All my friendship, Komona, from one you know as unfortunate.

My sister:

As you must gather from this I am alive, if no one else who was with me is; I’m also well, and in the City of Arko, held as a slave in the Mezem… a life I have accepted only because the only alternative is death. My ring-name, which is Arkan, is the only name I am known by here. You can follow my fate at least with respect to what I am forced to do here by reading the Pages of Arko, Mezem section.

I send everyone there my love, with all my heart. Mama, shadow-father, step-dad, my brothers, my sisters, my child, and all my wider family—I can’t tell you how much I miss you all, how much I wish I were there, and how much I regret what has happened.

My sister, you must have my last letter by now. You may take everything in it doubly to heart now.

I don’t know how to arrange for any of you to write me back, but I will most certainly write again if I can. You may trust me to do everything in my ability to win free and return home. I see clear signs of war on Yeola-e here, so I hope those in authority are preparing.

With more love than these words can possibly convey,
I am your

Rao Kyavinara

I held back the tears as I wrote, but when I handed the folded packet to him, and pressed his hands to my forehead in gratitude, I could not. “I’ll slip it in with the mail from the right office and when they come back from Jitzmitthra, no one will notice it hasn’t been there seven days,” he said, and was gone. So young, and already so Arkan that even someone else’s tears embarrassed him.

When he came back, he took me up to a balcony. His balcony, he happened to say; what he hadn’t told me was that all the rooms we had been in, almost from when we’d stepped into the Marble Palace, were counted as his personally. They were probably as spacious, in and of themselves, as a third of the Hearthstone Dependent.

It was the end of Jitzmitthra; the last city tradition that remained, he told me, was the Washing of the Streets. That’s what the people had been starting, scrubbing the statues.

Like everything else, Arko does the Washing of the Streets grand. From the Rim that is close to the Marble Palace fell a tiny waterfall, like a slender silver ribbon. Then, just as the sun half-disappeared beneath the Rim, there was a rumble that shook the earth, even the lofty untouchable heights of the Marble Palace, matched by the roar of cheering from tens of thousands of Arkans massed on the roofs of buildings below. The one thread of water became ten ropes and then ten shimmering white curtains, that melded into one thundering cataract as the cliff turned into a slope, and then rushed like a splitting avalanche into the city, turning every street into a fast-flowing river.

Arko is built to withstand this, the streets curbed so as to keep the water out of cellars and ground floors, and carefully canted so that it does not pool anywhere. It scours away dirt, and, in the Arkan mind, the bad residues of the last year, as no human effort can.

Once an eight-day they clean the streets this way, but for the one on the last day of Jitzmitthra more water is set free, prevented from running through the many tunnels in the ground they’ve carved to convey it to all the things it powers, from the Great Press to the lefaetas in Feliras’ Glory, the entire reservoir above the Rim emptied so as to be itself cleansed.

As the sky darkened, people began setting out floating candles, and in time the whole city shone with them, tiny glittering lines of bobbing stars reflecting those that shone in the sky.

So much of Arko’s art and tradition is about the sky, from the eagle that is the national sigil, to glass, which lets in the sky and represents air, to the sun-discs on the temples, to this earthly reflection of the heavens. Even the vastly hierarchical nature of the society could be interpreted as those above attempting to rise higher at the expense of those below.

It occurred to me that the reason for this I already knew, from lessons I’d had as a child, though they were as distant from the living thing as reading a bit of text about a person is from meeting them.

It is that Arkans believe that they are a fallen people, whose ancestors came from the sky. What truth there can be to this, when they seem just as tragically human as anyone else, even those things about them that are alien having human explanations, I don’t know. But they believe it absolutely, even those among them who have been cast down and made, by their own countrymen, the lowest.

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This scene from Minis’s point of view.