T H E • P H I L O S O P H E R • I N • A R M S: 104

I had thought about Jinai’s augury for me many times already, in Arko, wondering exactly how much pain “so much more than you can bear, so huge, beyond imagining” meant. It had already seemed so, many times; it had been all I could do to hold myself together in the face of it, it seemed.

And yet when I look back, it always feels like my suffering in Arko, other than from fighting, truly started then, when we were caught with Erilas, or should I say Piras, in the Great Gate. The one thing to be said for severe suffering is that it shows trivial suffering, which seemed severe at the time, in its true light as trivial.

The same slave came and spoon-fed me a bowl of tasteless gruel, and gave me more water, but otherwise I was left alone with my aches, changing from those of how I’d been lying in the false carriage-bottom to those of how I was lying now, and my thoughts.

Now and then footsteps passed in the corridor, or I heard voices, mostly talking curtly, sometimes raging or screaming—other people who’d been arrested, I guessed. Men, I should say; all but one or two seemed to be. In a land where only men were permitted to do anything of note, only men seemed to commit crimes; it was oddly logical. I’d already gathered that Arko was full of dishonest people, so the numbers weren’t surprising. It also occurred to me that some might have been arrested for doing things that weren’t truly wrong, but only thwarted the wishes of those who were more powerful, as I had been.

Somewhere else in this place, Mana must be chained in a similar cell; I decided not to try calling to him, in case we were still so far succeeding in our pretense not to be friends. Hang on, heart’s brother, I said to him in my mind. If we could get out of it when we hit my grandmother with a snowball, we can get out of this.

The window went dark as night fell, the slave came with a chamber-pot—everything’s on a schedule at the Ministry of Internal Serenity—and I wondered when that Sereniteer would come back demanding to know the secret I was still keeping by some miracle: my real name. I wondered over and over why it had been so easy to pull the wool over his eyes. All I could come up with was that Arkans tend to be utterly blind to anything they think is too good to be true, such as having the “king” of Yeola-e firmly in their hands, and that official ones particularly must feel constrained to believe whatever story came out of the Marble Palace, so he was firm in his mind that I’d been kidnapped by Roskati rebels. Perhaps also it wasn’t real to him that I must have a name at all, other than Karas Raikas.

I slept fitfully. In the morning the slave fed me and let me relieve myself again. Shortly before noon, two Mahid came, unchained me from the wall and led me out. Ahead in the corridor I saw two others taking Mana, who looked as if he was all right at least from behind, though he was walking stiffly, as I was. Before him two more had another black-clad man I didn’t recognize, though by his blond hair, which had been carelessly hacked short, he was Arkan. Erilas? I couldn’t tell by the way he moved, stiffly as he did, but that could be satin, and I remembered that he was in truth okas; like a new-captured slave, he’d had his hair cut against his will, to the length that was proper in the Arkan mind. None of us tried to speak to the others.

The city square of Arko sits before the Marble Palace, with a long fountain between; above that, some five man-heights up in the wall, is the Presentation Balcony, from which the Imperator addresses assembled crowds. We were led there now, and a crowd was gathering; I’d expected to be punished, but not quite so publicly. Where the fountain should be was a dais a little shorter than a man-height, with two whipping frames on it, and between them a thing like a coarse-barred cage just large enough to hold a person, on a pedestal that was some kind of machinery.

As they led us onto the dais, and the crowd noise grew louder with whoops, cheers, gasps, and the odd cry of “No!” a golden motion on the balcony above caught my eye. Sitting there was Minis; beside him, among a coterie of other people obviously there to attend and serve, sat someone even more expensively dressed, a big-paunched man with a clean-shaven face and a dark red patch on his cheek, a birthmark, it appeared.

Kurkas.

That was my first sight ever of him, with whom I should have been sitting, after we’d gone through the exchange of gifts and other diplomatic niceties, to try to talk him out of making war on Yeola-e. As they fastened me into one of the whipping-frames, and Mana into the other, I tried to study the Imperator’s face, as if I could learn anything from this distance. Something lifted and inserted itself into his mouth; something on an Arkan eating-utensil. Noon observance had just passed; he was having noon meal. I saw him say something to Minis, who was staring at me, but then took a bite, too.

You’d free me from this, I thought. And maybe Mana too, if I asked. But for your own sake, you cannot let him know. He was struggling to get the food down. I knew. Mana looked all right from the front, too; his and my eyes caught across the contraption between us, but we both quickly looked away. I did just one thing for him—kept my face calm—and saw he was doing the same for me.

A herald was bellowing something in formal Arkan, which was hard to understand, but I caught “Mahid,” and one stepped forward, who I knew as the one who’d stun-darted me. Suddenly he fell down flat on his face, toward Kurkas, as if he’d been flung. I thought for a moment he’d been darted himself, I couldn’t imagine by whom, but then a voice from the balcony said a word, and he rose back to standing smooth as water. The prostration, I thought. They really do it.

The herald bellowed again, and I strained to understand. “Piras Dem, okas,” I caught. “His life… also the lives of two…” He owed them, it seemed to mean—does that mean we don’t? “Die three times…” Whatever it was made Erilas try to make a break again, then say words that were so many times up I could not understand them at all, but by their tone were a plea for mercy. One of the Mahid slapped him hard in the face until he said no more, and they locked him into the device.

I am going to detail no more. Mana and I were stripped with a knife, flogged, but not killed; Erilas was, in so cruel and shaming a way that I will not add to the disrespect shown him as he died by setting down one word of description. Though some of the crowd yelled favourable things to me and Mana—even their hurt objections to us trying to leave them, one might take that way—they had nothing but jeers for Erilas. Kurkas kept eating, looking as if he were enjoying himself mightily; just like in the Mezem, hawkers moved among the crowd selling sweets and sausages and wine. I said the precious little I could say to Erilas, to comfort him—mostly that it would be over in time--earning myself a few backhands from the Mahid torturer for it.

It lasted until noon the next day. When Kurkas rose to leave, the entire crowd went into the prostration, lying together like corpses after a massacre until he permitted them to rise, which I would not have thought possible; they’d had long practice. All night we were in the frames and Erilas in the device, torture in and of itself, and forbidden to move or speak, by a Mahid who stood watch. Sometime past midnight, there was a faint hint of light on the Balcony, and I saw a small white-blond head in the sickly-pale moonlight. Minis. He faced me, but I could not see his eyes.

We had to watch; if we tried to turn away or clench our eyes shut they’d hit us until we were watching again. I am only watching, and can’t take it, I thought, a thousand times, while Erilas has to suffer it; then I’d watch until I had to turn away again. I could not watch without remembering that Erilas would still be free and whole if he’d never met me; the Mahid meant to impress that on us too, that his blood was on our hands, by doing such things as marking our faces with it.

I could not watch, in the end, without begging them to spare him and take me in his place, since it had indeed been my fault, even as Mana yelled across at me, “Che—no! He’s just a kyashin Arkan! You are you! Semana kra!” until they struck him silent, the blows like whip-cracks across the dais, and the crowd whooped and laughed and hurled up its own comments.

I went out of my mind, as it was happening. I confess that. They brought Erilas’s family, and made them part, though I will not write a word of how. How could I not go out my mind? And yet Mana didn’t; when it was over, and we were back in the Mezem, bathed and stitched and Haian-dosed by Iska and the boys—the Mezem, home and safety!—he could walk to his room, but I could not. There was no spirit or mind left in me, to give me that much strength.

This scene from Minis’s point of view (graphic warning).