108 - Minis’s oath

“Raikas… may I come in, please?” It seemed Minis had not forsaken me, at least not yet. He shut the door behind himself. I saw him begin to order Mana out of the chair beside the bed, then think better, realizing it would be rude. He sat down on the floor cross-legged, as if he were any child, not one coated with jewels. He started picking at them right away.

“They did it, didn’t they?” he asked, his voice tiny and quiet. His heart is not going to forsake me any time soon, I thought, for all his mind might see the necessity.

“Griumed me? Yes. I make fifty fights, they give me the antidote. And only the Marble Palace knows what it is.”

He looked at the floor, as if finding a dust-speck engrossing. “I don’t know. The Pharmacist would know.”

“You’re ripping up your clothes, lad,” said Mana.

“I have to rip up something. Better it can’t feel anything. My father… he likes all this.” He struggled for words, looking anywhere but at me, wanting anything but to tell me what he intended to. “He wants me to march you around the city on my leash,” he said finally.

“Oh. Is that all? I guess it would only be fair.” As if humiliation, I thought, could begin to even approach the least of my problems. But he was an Arkan, and a child.

“He must have told you who I am,” I said. “I hope you forgive me for not telling you. I thought it was safest for both of us.”

He stared at me. “I should forgive you?” It was always that that struck me about him: the sudden depth of understanding he could seem to have, out of nowhere. He didn’t deny he’d been told, though, or ask who I was. I wondered how many Arkans knew.“My father… is going to make it ugly, even more than it is.”

“Minis, you’re going to have to do what you’re going to have to do, and so am I, and we both have to live with it.” I didn’t feel like hearing dark prognostications, tell the truth. “That’s all. I’ll get the antidote sooner if he ransoms me. Unless you have some way of finding it…” An invitation to treason, I thought. Not the way to treat a friend. Yet, semana kra.

“The Pharmacist is allowed to lock me out of his office, because it’s dangerous.” All-Spirit, he’d do it in a blink, I thought. “And he doesn’t like me much.”

In a blink, if it were possible, I thought. I was better off speaking to a Haian, for many reasons. We’ve talked enough about me, I thought; it was too depressing, anyway. “How are your studies going?” He looked as if he hadn’t even been thinking about it. “You shouldn’t let anything distract you.”

“I should go,” he said, with a touch of both guilt and fear on his glass-transparent Arkan features.

“You don’t have to go on my account. I’m sorry if I sound too scolding.”

“No, no,” he said. “Not you.”

“What are you talking about? No one but me has the nerve to scold you, except on Jitzmitthra.”

“That wasn’t scolding.”

“No? I should have tried harder, then.” A small smile cracked his lips, a joy to see.

Then he was staring at me. “This is crazy. You’ve just had this done to you and you’re scolding me for not studying—”

“Someone has to do it.”

“Have you ever told this man he’s mad?” Minis asked Mana, who snorted.

“A thousand times,” he said. “He never listens.”

“Look, if the grium works the way Haian remedies do—curing the same ill they cause, if you already have it—it’ll drive me sane,” I said.

“All-Spirit forfend,” said Mana. “How would I know you?”

“It would be Jitz every day,” Minis said, with a sort of dreamy smile.

“Indeed,” I said. “Where’s my leash?” He burst out laughing. At least he’d stopped picking baubles off himself; they were scattered around him on the floor, like leaves around a tree in autumn, but glistening pricelessly. Skorsas would wet himself. He counted it all mine, incidentally: the gifts from Mezem-watchers, naturally, but also Minis’s leavings, since he was my friend and so would not otherwise be here to inadvertently enrich us. Since I seemed averse to spending it, Skorsas told me, he was investing it so that it would turn into more. Now, I thought, I am free to tell him I may not legally own anything.

“Minis,” I asked, “Have you ever watched someone who had the grium… saw what it did to him?”

“No. You want me to find out? There must be books.” In Arkan; I could read a little, now, but not nearly enough for a scholarly work. “In the Mahid library…” Of course, he could get into places I could not. “I don’t usually go to read there, but I could.”

I wasn’t sure I trusted even that, tell the truth. Not surprisingly, he didn’t know anyone who’d had it done—it was extremely expensive and therefore rare, I understood. Nothing but the best for visiting heads of state. I planned to ask a Haian, and get him (they’re all men, in Arko, since no one trusts women healers) to write home about it if he had to.

“He’s going to make it public,” said Minis.

“What, who I am?” I didn’t need to ask whom he meant by “he.”

“Yes. He figures it will shame you.”

“Gods of Arko help me,” I said, with mock horror. “I might lose all my fans.” Mana snorted again, and Minis giggled in spite of himself.

“But… he’ll have the Enchian Pages announce it and send it to the front…”

“My people already know I’m here… the letter, remember?” I’d already told Mana he’d sent a letter home for me, though now I wished I hadn’t. In Arko, the land of truth-drug, you tell as few people as possible what you know. “They won’t see the shame as mine. They must worry about me, but that was already the case. If anything it will make them angrier. Did you know I was coming into Arko for a state visit?” He wagged his head yes, in the Arkan way. I told him about the five copies of the safe conduct, and how Astalaz, Kranaj and Stevahn had one each. “I was doing something honourable, entrusting myself to his hospitality, to try to avert war. Though some thought it was unwise, no one thought it was wrong.”

“And he wants to eat your country,” Minis said, blearily. He’d already known; I wondered if Kurkas had summoned him in to pore over the maps with him.

“They already know I’ve been made a human fighting-dog here,” I said. “Have I lost you with my point, lad? It’s not a disaster. You could drag me around on a leash for ten years, and it would be less shame at home for me than just one of these.” I hooked my thumb under my fight-chains.

Minis looked a touch relieved, but the grin had fallen off Mana’s face. “Pardon me,” he said fast, got up and all but sprang out of the room. You want to scream, heart’s brother, I thought, but won’t do it in front of Kurkas’s son. Or in front of me... I remembered how we’d made an unspoken agreement to keep our feelings behind tight lips and stone faces while Erilas had been tortured. Arko was making both of us Arkan.

“Is he… was I rude?” Minis said.

“No, no, lad. I think he’s upset. I don’t blame him; what has happened to us is upsetting.”

He sat frozen for a while, adding to the litter of finery, his fine white-gold brows knit on a hard ridge of flesh. Then, resolved in his mind, he got up, sat on the chair and took my hand.

“You know I love you,” he said. “Not the bad way. But I do.”

“I know,” I said. “In my way I love you too.” He reached out his hand, and with the infinite gentleness that only a caring child can have, touched the place under my brow where the grium-needle had gone in. I closed my eyes to bask in it and that undid me; tears came hard, albeit silently.

“Raikas… I mean… Shefen-kas.” I looked at him, a jewel-covered boy swimming distantly in the blurriness of my tears, until I blinked them away. “I… I swear you an oath.” He made the Arkan sign of prayer, the cupped hands at the temple as if offering their heads and thus their souls to the Gods, which they also do when they swear oaths. His voice quavered as he spoke, and his own eyes reddened and brimmed with tears. “If… if it all goes bad… And you, and Yeola-e, don’t beat back my father’s rejins… on my hope of Celestialis, may I be flung into the smothering-pits of Hayel and second Fire come if I forswear… when I’m on the Crystal Throne myself… I’ll set Yeola-e free.”

I stared at him, the world freezing, and seeming huger than itself, as when you are about to faint.

What was it? A child’s oath. He was eleven, so at least ten years would pass before he became Imperator, since their law is that a man must be twenty-one; and Kurkas looked as if he could have many more years than that in him. Even in ten years, Minis would grow up; his mind would cease to be a boy’s, close to the innocence of what comes before life, and become a man’s, inculcated in his reality as it was now, in the routines and traditions and exigencies of Imperium. He would look back on himself at eleven and laugh, perhaps fondly, at how naïve he had been, as everyone does: how silly his attachments had been and how childishly, grandly impossible his promises. In ten years, whatever happened, I would be long gone, and he would be long over that which had urged him to do this: his need for me.

I knew all this; but something told me to take it as he meant it right then, with all his heart, with all of mine. Perhaps the child he was drew out the child in me, that could never conceive of disbelieving an oath any more than breaking one; perhaps it was the desperation of my position, that I felt that his promise was all I had, the one chance of the mistake of my life being reversed. Or perhaps it was just knowing him, and even a touch of foreknowledge. I have seen much since then; but there is part of me that is still absolutely iron-clad in believing that, had he had the choice, he would indeed have set Yeola-e free.

So I let the emotion take me, as if my people had already been enslaved, and he were setting them free right now. I cried full-throated, and curled around his hand, and then took him in my arms and wept shuddering; he was discomfited by it, thinking he’d somehow hurt me, until I managed to get out words, mostly “Thank you,” and “Nothing I could do in return would be enough,” and “My people thank you” in Yeoli. He stayed with me, just saying, “You give me you. That’s more than enough,” until it ran its course and I was calm again. As he was about to leave, I kissed him on the forehead. He stared at me for a while, eyes too full to speak, and was gone.

As I lay with the glow of his oath lying on me, what he had given me sank in, in full. From now on, no matter what happened, I would be able to think, “Even if we are conquered entirely, Minis will free us.” I would be able to have hope even when things took the very darkest of turns. I would be able to go to my death with it, even—in fact I definitely would; he would become Imperator the year I should turn thirty-one at the earliest.

But something else pulled at my mind, and I worried over it until I caught it. I had done something for him too. People go from the entire dependence of infancy to the strength of adulthood, in which we satisfy each other’s needs by choice and agreement; but of course it doesn’t happen all at once. He was eleven, old enough that he should start having it asked of him, at least now and then, so as to begin learning the reciprocity of maturity. He needed me, desperately, always; but now, about this, I needed him.

-

This scene from Minis’s point of view, first part; second part.

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