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.