90 - Fourth Siefenkas Siaeranoas kidnapped by Roskati

In the way of youngsters, Minis had forgotten he’d brought me here to show me the steel floor, so I reminded him and we went there. It is not so much a floor as a giant oval bowl, at least sixty paces long, with seats for spectators sloping steeply up from its edges. Bright-coloured team banners hung from above. He showed me where the nets into which players had to try to throw the faibilitz disc would be placed. Two white-kilted and gloved servants, who stopped working to make the usual obeisance to Minis, were wiping the bowl’s surface lovingly with soft cloths.

The shining metal showed no scratch or sign of rust, nor section or seam. How it had been wrought was beyond me. Beyond present-day Arko, too, as it turned out, Minis told me, a legacy of knowledge from before the Fire. If it were somehow ruined, he said, no one would be able to repair or replace it.When I’d finished looking—what I really wanted to see was a game—he took me back to the gate in which we’d come. The bounds of his own chamber were fairly well-guarded, for indoors, and outside there were more guards posted at doors and corners still, but no one seemed to mind having a foreigner, whose country their Imperator was possibly planning a war against, wandering freely through it with an un-peace-bonded longsword on his shoulder. It was because I was with Minis, I saw; I shouldn’t attempt to do this alone.

There are always two lines of carrying chairs in front of the Marble Palace, one with men who have wheels on their feet and the other who wear mere sandals. I’d have walked, but for the wound, so as Minis was leading me to the fast-chair line I told him I had nothing pressing and so would prefer slow. Sandaled bearers can take you at a run if you wish, but I had enough Arkan to tell them to walk, and so saw at my leisure all the wonders I’d been whisked by on the way here.

At the Mezem, Skorsas greeted me like a returning hero, as far as I could tell, lauding me for winning Minis’s favour as if I’d done some extraordinary deed to win it. I lay on my bed to rest the leg, and take stock of how dazzled my mind was, and reflect on it all.

It was easy for me to know what Arkans both low and high, I would learn later, hide from themselves: the wonders I had seen are not at all distant or removed, in truth, from the squalor of the poor quarter or the carnage of the battlefield. They are dependent on it.

In Yeola-e, where everyone has about as much as everyone else, since we hold that acquiring more is not in keeping with All-Spirit, it’s generally believed that among other peoples, every speck of the wealth of the rich is stolen brutally from the mouths of the poor. While visiting Brahvniki, living in Laka and then living in Arko, I made something of a study of this, and to my mind now it isn’t quite so simple; there are ways in which all people can enrich themselves as one, if all want it for all. But where the differences are extreme, the Yeoli belief holds true. When the rich live in utter excess, the poor live in utter squalor and bitterness, and their numbers are more.

It’s not that someone like Minis in a nation like Arko hates the millions who live from hand to mouth both in the countryside, and the vast fields of shacks in the City; it’s that they, and their fate, don’t enter his thoughts, except as the means by which he has what he has. Among a people who do not vote, the very numbers of the powerless incline the powerful to think less about them, since they see them only in their number, not personally, and only as an endless and unthinking source of gold, as a river is a source of water to drink. They take it entirely for granted, except for having an unspoken, primeval fear of things changing, as I’d seen in Minis when I’d happened to say that if every slave walked away, that would be the end of it. That fear, of course, is what invented the ten-beaded whip, and founded the Mahid.

†

The Pages comes out on the second and sixth days of each eight-day, so there was one on the second day of the new year, two days before the first fights after Jitzmitthra. Iska wasn’t quite sure whether I should fight or not, but I’d been matched with one of the other one-chainers in case I was cleared.

I had a feeling, from reading the Enchian Pages, which Iska got in for me, that I would be. My besting Koree three times in a row sparring was written up in detail, as was my first fight, and the writers were saying that I had it in me to be the greatest since so-and-so, yea many years back, if I got over my nervousness of being in the Ring. Trust them to attribute hesitation to kill to nervousness.

I read more carefully the foreign affairs section. When I’d written to Artira that here, the signs of war were clear, what I’d truly meant was here in my memory of Jinai’s reading, which of course had not been a public one. Now I looked for clues of confirmation between the lines.

Of course I could not expect anything like, “The Imperator will invade Yeola-e!”; Kurkas and his generals would hardly share their plans with the writers. But I could guess that, in the way that rumours of atrocities by the barbarians next door and other tales of their evil and degeneracy or what-have-you are spread among people when a king plans to invade said barbarians, such stories might show up here.

I was not disappointed; there wasn’t a new incident, but there were references to previous ones in other articles. A perfectly peaceful Arkan merchanter had been attacked by Yeoli pirates who’d killed everyone on board, and were found to have been taking secret orders from Assembly Palace, though how they’d found that out when all the Arkans had been killed, I wasn’t sure.

A perfectly peaceful group of ten solas, heavy-armed but with their weapons peace-bonded in the Brahvnikian fashion, had been beset by a mob led by Yeolis in a bar in Brahvniki, and one of them killed by torture that had lasted an entire day, though mobs don’t generally engage in slow torture, and nor are they generally up to taking on a unit of heavy-armed warriors. (Maybe most Arkan Pages readers didn’t know how easy to break a Brahvnikian peace-bond is, but I did.)

I didn’t see it quite yet, but I would in time: stories about Yeola-e very often made reference to mobs, and faceless masses of people having so much power that they were dangerous. I understood: best make the tradition of voting look evil, else too many Arkans might like to try it, to the detriment of he who currently sat on the Crystal Throne.

Of course my own name leapt up off the page more than anything else, at least once I deciphered it; it was an Enchian translation of an Arkan spelling of a Yeoli name, so I spotted it by the “Fourth.” Again it was a reference to a previous recounting, but it let me know the story Kurkas wanted told.

At least the blame wasn’t being ascribed to me or Yeola-e, but it was to poor Mirko: “…since the kidnapping of the Yeoli king Fourth Siefenkas Siaeranoas by Roskati rebels after they attacked his Arkan escort, and half of his Yeoli escort treasonously and unwisely did likewise, the other half defending”—as if that could happen in a thousand years with me there. I wondered if whoever sat in an office in Arko inventing these things also wrote bad novels. In my letter I had not warned against trusting Arko’s word, but Artira and everyone else were wise enough, I was sure, to see that for themselves.

What was most horrifying about it, in a sense, was that the perfection of the letters in which such slanders were casually expressed. I had never before read writing made by a machine rather than a hand, with every line of letters absolutely straight as the surface of a still pond, all the lines spaced apart exactly evenly, and every letter flawlessly-formed and identical to every other same letter, making it easier to read than the work of the greatest calligrapher. It made the lies it conveyed seem somehow more credible.