107 - At war with us

Of course I could not ask, “Do you now know who I am?” If they didn’t, the old Mahid would be asking me “Why—should we?”

Don’t be a fool, I told myself. Accept it: they know. They had truth-drugged it out of me on the day that my memory had lost. Else why had they come back just for me, and not Mana as well? I tried not to feel anything; as odd and unreal as everything seemed, it wasn’t hard.

I was to lie in their care for two days, the Pharmacist told me, then I’d go back to the Mezem. They unbound me, lifted me onto a litter and bore me off to a room somewhere else in this stark quarter of the Marble Palace; just raising my head showed me why they didn’t fear my resisting, for I had to lie back in a moment, sick and spinning. Still, the bed they laid me in had a neck-restraint. The middle-aged and apprentice Mahid stayed.

I got them to give me water and a katzerik, slept for a while, and then spoke with the youth, as best I could. He was permitted only to answer my questions, the other, his uncle and teacher as it turned out, watching him like a hawk; as my eyes were bandaged, I could not see this, but I could feel it, like the heat of a fire on the skin.

The youth’s given name was Ilesias, same as the composer and the ancient great Imperator. From him I learned that the Mahid were a clan, of Aitzas caste—I’d thought so, from the length of Minis’s Mahid’s hair—whose stock in trade was simply ultimate loyalty to the Imperator, and the willingness to do anything he commanded. They served as spy chiefs, torturers, concubines, messengers, body-servants, bodyguards: anything that demanded someone utterly trustworthy. Most were in the City, but some worked out in the Empire or beyond; they tended to be sent in greater numbers to territories being, or recently, conquered.

A perfect Mahid, Ilesias taught me, thinks only the fifty maxims he has been taught from childhood, feels and does and is only what the Imperator’s will requires. The training, I could tell, was rigorous and brutal; that was clear just from the deadness of his voice.

Eventually his uncle left him alone with me, and he unbandaged my eyes, to which feeling had returned; the one was sore from front to back. I had spoken with him first mostly to make trouble; his soul cried out to be subverted.

When I repeated a rumour I’d heard, that Kurkas had never been weaned—he’d known at two he’d have absolute power, threatened his mother into keeping going, and now had a stable of slave wet-nurses as well as the finest in Arkan cuisine—I could almost hear Ilesias’s brain creaking in his skull as it flinched away. But I found myself concerned for him. Over the day we made friends; he even consented to take a message to the Mezem, telling Iska and Skorsas I was alive.

On the second day, I saw I’d got him into trouble; he was deathly tired, and dreaded speaking even a word. It turned out his superiors had told him he was to torture and cripple me; in that sort of way young Mahid are taught not to make friends. I told him they wouldn’t waste the grium sefalian if they didn’t mean me to keep fighting, but just toss me in the dungeon. When the orders came to take me back to the Mezem, he nearly fell over.

Skorsas and Iska took me off his arm at the gate, and put me straight into the bath. Now, in a familiar place, I came down from the dream, and could no longer avoid seeing all the world had changed, like a house twisted a fingerwidth off its foundations by an earthquake; now I wept and cursed and threw up, and would have smashed my head against the tiles except I’d been warned against moving it quickly.

Once I was in my room, Mana came straight in, unconcerned that anyone saw. As we seized each other, he burst into tears. “I betrayed you! I betrayed Yeola-e! I couldn’t help it, I couldn’t help it, Cheng…”

“Truth-drug?” I said, weakly. To know for sure was like hearing the tolling slam of a huge gate. He signed chalk against my back. “We were both in, Mana, and Iska thinks they did the same to me. So I will have betrayed myself, and Yeola-e, just as much as you.”

“Thinks…?” He wrapped his hand around my head. “You don’t know? You were gone until close to the death-hour that first night, I heard.”

“I don’t remember anything up to sometime before noon meal of that day,” I said. “Iska and Skorsas told me that Mahid came for me, drugging my food, and they took you too. He was thinking maybe it was about our trying to escape. There is also something I remember about an orange jewel, and that it was crucial, but I can’t make sense of that, so far. I can’t remember, Iska said, because they have another drug for that, for making you forget.”

His arms tightened on me, pressing my cheek into his. “All-Spirit… All-Spirit, Cheng…” He took a deep breath, while I felt all the sicker with dread, for knowing how much it took to stifle his cheer.

“I know you know something I don’t,” I said. “I saw that in your eyes the next morning, when we were going to meet.” I took a deep breath, and set my teeth. “Tell me.”

“They are at war with us.”

I had already known, in truth, in my heart, in my bones, where truth and only truth, no lies, resides. “What did they tell you about it?”

“Nothing, except the order has been given.” I thought of Kurkas on the Presentation Balcony, with his birthmark and his jowls working as he chewed, sauce dribbling out of the corners of his mouth as if no one ever taught him that was rude, while Minis sat beside hollow-eyed beside him. “They told me it was the procedure, to truth-drug every man from a nation they’re trying to conquer who would be considered either solas or Aitzas if he were Arkan, in case he might…” He choked on a sob. “… have some useful knowledge.”

I tried my best, but couldn’t keep everything from going a little dark again, my arms loosening from around him and my head falling onto his shoulder. The world seemed distant. I had appointed myself chakrachaseye, and so made it my business, and a point of pride, to have everything a chakrachaseye might be asked in my head. “Strength, Cheng, strength,” he whispered into my ear. “I’ve got you.”

“They must have truth-drug-scraped me,” I said, when I could, in a voice he must have been barely able to hear. “I have to assume they did… and so deduce what they know. They’ll have made me forget so that I wouldn’t.”

What would you least like us to know?

My name. That’s what I would have said, I was certain.

What would you second-least like us to know?

Everything went entirely dark. I was looking at my ceiling, next I knew, with Mana leaning over me, his arm under my head and my bed under the rest of me. It was not possible to bear, conscious, knowing what I would have said, when they asked that question, at least for a moment. It was the thing that I could not even tell Mana. I closed my eyes again, and saw my mother’s face in mind. What I wouldn’t have given, to run screaming into her arms and bury my face in her breast, to lose fifteen or even twenty years and everything I had done, suffered and learned in them.

What could the Arkans do with my foreknowledge? My mind shrunk from playing it out, pushed it off until later. Third-least… the rest would all be the secrets of Yeola-e’s defense. I have to assume they have everything of significance, I thought. How to get another letter to Artira, telling her to alter every arrangement and contingency that could be altered? Minis would forsake me now, for certain; probably he would be angry at me for the lie by omission of hiding who I was from him. He’d forsake me even if he didn’t want to; he’d have to. Now, any Arkan who aided me was committing treason.

“I read through today’s Enchian Pages,” Mana said, stroking my brow. “There was nothing in it. I guess they’re keeping it secret yet. Chevenga… Chevenga.” He shook me, slightly. “Strength, heart’s brother. You are thinking that now, more than ever, you are useless and a curse; but in truth, now—more than ever—you are needed.” I took a deep breath, and pulled myself up onto my elbows. “What did they do to you?” he said, and I had to explain the grium.

His intake of breath was like a sword being drawn, but after a moment’s thought he said, “Cheng, that’s what they told you, that this thing will kill you without an antidote that only they have. But Arkans have not always been truthful with us.”

“True,” I said. “Perhaps there is no antidote at all.”

He clenched a handful of my hair and pulled it gently. “Or perhaps the stuff is nothing. If you believe them, it works just as well as if it were real, doesn’t it? What you should do is go to a Haian. They have cures for everything short of death.” I signed chalk.

“What did they do to you?” I asked him.

“Truth-drug, as I said. Nothing else. That was bad enough. First question, what would I least like them to know… All-Spirit. Your mind is wanting to rip out your heart, but your body just lies there and your mouth opens and your tongue moves and the words come out, and there is nothing you can do to stop them, no matter how much you want to, no matter what you would do to prevent it. It must have been so much worse for you.”

“Maybe this forgetting-drug is a mercy,” I said, “though I’m sure they didn’t give it to me for that reason.”

“I know there’s a certain forgetting-drug I wouldn’t mind many cups of, right now,” he said. “But… listen, heart’s brother.”

Mana took a deep breath, his honest handsome face under its shock of red-brown curls going resolved, and gripped my shoulders with his two hands. He’d written in his mind what he was about to say, running over it many times, I saw.

“We have to trust, Chevenga, in the strength of everyone at home, in the Yeoli people. They are not cowards or weaklings. Think of your shadow-father, your mother, all your little sword-wielding sibs; think of Azaila; think of Hurai and Emao-e and the army that humbled the Lakans. Think of the senaheral in the Shrine, of the Servants of Assembly, of Yeola… think of Hetharin and Haranin and the eagle wheeling beneath your dangling feet on a cliff. Think of All-Spirit, the will of the people, which is always to be free… of all these things, which together are our strength, a strength that comes less from a muscular arm than a fired heart.

“Our people are not going to lie down and show their bellies to Arko just because you are not there, or even because you have given up secrets, or even if you are held for ransom. They’re not going to let themselves be enchained, and when someone fights wholly, as you know, they are invincible. Arko thinks it knows what it’s getting into; Arko has no idea. And it hasn’t got that from you with this evil drug, either; those black-clad thugs can’t even conceive of the questions to ask to learn that. And perhaps you wouldn’t be able to put it into words that did it justice, even if you weren’t on the drug, anway.

“You feel your strength ebb, Chevenga; take strength from them, knowing that they have it. Take strength from me, as I remember the same.” Now he found a smile. “No one will fail you, or themselves, until you get home, one way or another. And then… you know.” He gently thumped my chin with a pair of knuckles. “We’ll thrash their pasty, blond-cracked, shit-spewing asses all the way back to this dung-heap of a city.” That made me find a smile myself.

--