105 - When the sun rises, to carry you home

More than anything, I needed sleep, since I had had none the night before. But every time my mind faded into it to any depth, I was back on the dais with Erilas being killed over and over and over, and I’d be flung back into full wakefulness screaming or sobbing until I knew I was in the Mezem.

“I think we should give you something to make you sleep,” Skorsas said, to which I stabbed out charcoal. “I order you to take something to make you sleep,” Iska said, a few more crying-fits later. “Do we have to hold you down?” It was poppy-juice; not a moment after drinking it, or so it seems as I remember it, I was put out like a candle.

I woke after dark, my bed soaked with sweat, the flogging-wounds burning with pain, from my having tossed on my back. “You can’t have eaten anything for a day and a half now,” said Skorsas; they’d given us sips of water on the dais, but that was all. We’d peed right on its wooden surface, which no one had even seemed to notice.

“I’m not hungry.” My voice was a stammering rasp, broken.

“You must be, even if you forbid yourself to feel it. Just some broth, Raikas… I’ll be back.” He was going to tempt me with it by holding it under my nose, I realized. It was chicken, warm and liquid; it smelled like blood and tasted like ash. I kept my eyes open; every time I closed them, Eliras’s destruction was there.

Skorsas stayed with me, as the tears and stammering came and went in waves. Near midnight Iska ordered more poppy juice, a stiffer dose, and when I woke in the morning my mind felt palsied, as if it had been dead but was now resurrected, but only in part.

Skorsas stayed with me, his hand always on my head or a part of my shoulder that was not whip-torn, even though I stayed turned to the wall. Every now and then he would say, “It’s all right, Raikas.” When crying took me, he’d give me his other hand to grip as well.

That day after noon, Minis came, with a jar of two-century-old nakiti, as I found later. As always, he asked leave to come in, and in what was left of my voice I granted it. He sat, and Skorsas scurried out. Without the skill of practice, but with the deliberateness of caring, he wiped my face with a damp cloth, while I just lay with my eyes closed, trying to let how good it felt reach into the hollow core of fire that was my heart. He, of course, knew what I had seen, having seen it himself, and that was in his touch, too. I remembered my step-father once saying of me, when he thought I couldn’t hear, “Was that child ever a child?” You could ask it even more, about Minis.

When he kissed me on the cheek, took my head onto his lap and stroked my hair, salved my cheeks which were raw from tears, with the intense sincerity that only a child has, his gentleness undid me. “Let it out,” he kept saying. “They torture people by making them keep it in… so it must be best if you let it out.” I told him he should stay away from me, tainted as I was, but he just shushed me.

“I know I don’t know how to show it,” he whispered after a while, “but… I love you, Raikas. Even if I don’t know what that is.”

“I know,” I whispered. “You do… better than you know. In my way, I love you too.” And then he sang me a song his nurse had to have sung him, who was motherless, to soothe him to sleep as a baby, not so long ago. Arkan didn’t feel like a language in which lullabies were even possible, but it was. “Ten silver horses, wherever you roam; and when the sun rises, to carry you home.” I fell asleep to the sweet sound of the young voice, and the loving touch of the little hands, of Kurkas’s son.

†

I took solid food for dinner, in my room, but could only eat about half of it. Iska came in, and sat purposefully beside me.

“Mannas is up and around,” he said. “He was even in training today… light, of course, but he did some. He wanted to be there. What is happening with you?”

The words locked up, strangled by tears, almost as soon as I tried to explain; I turned away from him, curled, and just let it out, as Minis had urged me.

“I can tell you exactly why he’s taking it so hard,” Skorsas said to Iska, as if he’d forgotten I could understand Arkan, or felt at this point it didn’t matter. It was one-up, of course, but I made it out well enough. “It’s because—well, when he came here, what was I to him, just some spawn of the place imprisoning him, right? But he comforted me in my grief—a perfect stranger, and one of the people who took away his freedom, and he still gave me his shoulder to cry on. He cares about everyone, Iska—everyone, all the same, as if they’re all important, no matter how low they are. Even a dirty scum of an okas crook who was incompetent enough to get them caught and probably rooked him blind for the price, even, he feels for. Mannas has the sense to just think, eh, what’s he to me, who cares, but this one—he’s head-touched that way.”

“Hmm… Raikas…” He laid his hand on my shoulder. “Is that true? That the smuggler being punished means something to you? It keeps coming back, doesn’t it, like you’re there again…?”

That unlocked my tongue. “I know you’re Arkan, Iska, but do you have anything resembling a heart? They”—and here I described some of what they had done to Erilas, including the last, which as I said I will not write—“right in front of his wife, and his little children! They’ll have that sight etched on their inward eyes for the rest of their lives! And it was for helping me! He gave his life doing what I asked, trying to get me out of Arko! I wish he’d never met me—how can I not? Why are you asking me this as if there is something wrong with me? There’s something wrong with you, and with everyone in this cursed cesspit of a city, if you need me to explain this to understand it!”

“You are right, lad,” he said. It was Skorsas he said this to; but he didn’t try to argue me out of my position. “You just have to accept that it has happened,” he said to me. “And resolve not to make that mistake again; that will help you come to peace.”

Semana kra, I thought. My duty is to escape. But the thought of trying again did make something inside me writhe squirming away from it, like a caterpillar touched by a firebrand.

That is the style of torture in Arko: to hurt you so deeply and extremely that a fear or an aversion or a compulsion is graven on you so strongly it becomes stronger than your will, and so through it, Arko controls you. That is what they call ‘broken.’

I healed, of course; I was back in training the next day, and matched to fight a half-moon less a day after Erilas’s execution. The next day also, Mana somehow found a time when both his boy and mine were away from our rooms, snuck in and shot the bolt. “You shouldn’t be in here!” I hissed, but couldn’t help but fling my arms around him as he flung his around me, and cling so hard it hurt even uninjured parts, both of us burying our heads in each other’s necks and breaking into gasping sobs.

We just hung on for a while, without words, and just that one long embrace healed deep. We also went out to the woods in the days after and there he talked with me long, reminding me that Erilas had known the risk, and charged us accordingly, and we were paid up to when it had ceased to matter, and had been ready to pay the rest. (I never learned what happened to those two hundred and some gold chains; my guess would be that they ended up in the pockets of various Sereniteers.) The seizings of my mind by the horrors of Erilas’s death eased up, both in waking and in sleep, though it was two moons before they ceased coming of their own accord entirely.

But of course I kept asking myself whether the torturers had broken me as they intended, disheartening me from trying again to escape, and in the end I knew they had, in part. I would try again; but I knew I would not be able to bring myself to seek help from an Arkan. The charcoal in me on that was as firm in its resolve as a cliff-face is hard, enough that I told Mana that any such escape-plan was out of the question. So, they’d succeeded in cutting off every avenue for us that depended on that.

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Minis’s visit from Minis’s point of view.

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