137 - Her blessing

The Pages and the Watcher both accorded me title as Living Greatest, and it was just as Skorsas had said: gifts from those who’d benefited from the odds against me poured in, as did money through who knew what sorts of arrangements he’d made. The crowd at my next fight was dotted everywhere with black heads: people wearing wigs that looked like my hair, the Aitzas complete with the gold leaves.

As Skorsas had advised, I sat for a sculptor and a painter both, mostly to humour him. I went out of my way to be good to him, both to console him for my not being his lover, and to atone for hitting him.

Yet to be close to me without hope of love-making caused him no pain, he assured me, but the sweetest joy, every fingerwidth. “I know now I have no claim on you, or ever could,” he said, twining his fingers in the back of my hair, one of the things I let him do now. “You’re a king.” To the Arkan mind, no one has claim on a king, not even a people.

So I let him hold my hand and gaze at me and speak endearments in public, so we were a pair in every way but one. Of course the writers made much of it, and our love became common knowledge: good, for it diverted suspicion from Niku. At first it bothered me, that he seemed to love me more the more I killed; then it came to me, it was the more I stayed alive.

A polite letter came from one Haiksilias Lizan, fessas, requesting that I sit for him to paint my portrait; Skorsas, who insisted on going through my mail with me in case I missed anything, made his typical shocked gasp when I read the name. It seemed Haiksilias was considered the greatest painter in Arko, and the portrait would be raised in the Hall of the Greats. What choice had I but to agree? The sitting was interminable—I was never one for being still long—but the painting was astonishing, like looking in a mirror that could reflect with wisdom and feeling.

On the streets, one could soon buy luck-charms with my figure, stamped out of a mold, porcelain in the poor quarter, gold in the rich. One tavern became the haunt of my followers, for no other reason than its name, the House of the Mountains. Going along, the proprietor had my face painted on the sign, in the style that had become standard, following an engraving in the Watcher: straight frontal, the lines too square and perfect—they forgot I’d had my nose broken—the eyes wrought of pure sentimentality, huge, dark and sad to lugubriousness, and hauntingly following the viewer wherever he went in the room.

I only know of the place because Mana insisted that I see it, and we crept in through the kitchen—threatening to show my face to the clientele, which might start a riot, if the proprietor didn’t let us—to peek through the service-slot. The black-curly-wigged throng sung my praises—sometimes in actual song—over their beer. It was bewildering. What did I truly mean to them, who meant nothing to me?

I knew I was truly great when Koree threw me, smoothed the dust of the training-ground with my face and said, “Don’t let it get to your head, cockspur. You can still die.”

†

One day, an ornate little wooden box came, wrapped in pink and red silk with a gold ribbon; since they often had sweets in them, I opened it. It was lined in cushioned satin, very elaborately embroidered, all framing what seemed to be a tiny bit of meat, entirely desiccated, wrapped in a white rose of silk. For some reason I found myself afraid to touch it. I read the note, seeking clues. The writing looked like an eight-year-old’s. “Dear Karas Raikas: I am scribing under great duress for on behalf of my twelve-year-old sister, who loves you and wants to dedicate herself so entirely to you that only this gift can express it, our great Noble God help her.”

Skorsas happened to come bustling in at that moment. His shriek almost made me drop the box. “Kaina marugh miniren!” he screeched again, meaning “dog mother of the Ten Gods,” the most blasphemous curse Arkans have. His face was ashen. “Close that up! My blessed professional God, close it, close it!! You didn’t touch it, did you? Oh, my God!! Where in Hayel did it come from?”

I closed the lid, and read off the street and number of the house, which was in the Aitzas quarter. “Why? What is it, Skorsas?”

His tongue seemed to stick to his teeth, and his cheeks turned from grey to flaming red. “Celestialis… I don’t think I can tell you, love of my life… But—no, no, don’t ask Iska! We’ve got to keep this secret; that poor idiot girl will be in more trouble than anyone deserves, and… my diligent God, what do we do?”

“I don’t know how you expect me to know, when I don’t even know what the thing is,” I answered in a very even voice, hoping my calm would rub off on him. “Is it something sacred, that shouldn’t leave their house?”

“No!—I mean, yes! It’s sacred—cursed—blessed—I mean, cursed for a man to touch, or—Shefen-kas, it’s a women’s thing, it’s the abomination, it’s the vow, it’s her blessing, it should go to the man she’s betrothed to, it’s… Shefen-kas… Celestialis help me… Shefen-kas, forgive me, I beg you, please, but... do you know anything about… purification?”

My gorge came up far too fast to let me get to the garderobe. I put the box down harder than I could help on the night-table, and vomited my guts out into the chamberpot. He knelt with me, steadying me in his arms, saying, “This shows how pure and clean-hearted you are.”

I had not known the entirety of the purification custom. That which was cut off is placed in a ceremonial container, to be presented to the girl’s husband-to-be on her betrothal, symbolic of her fertility, given into his ownership. Skorsas explained this to me, and my puke-tears turned into heart-tears.

“We should send it back,” I said, when I’d mastered myself.

“No! Her father will find out, and she’ll be disgraced for the rest of her life, maybe made unmarriageable, for nothing more than childish stupidity!” Once again his eyes had that you-brute-why-don’t-you-get-it look.

“If we keep it or do anything else, he’ll eventually notice it’s missing.”

He stood biting his lip, not wanting to say what he must say, but eventually said it. “Fine. I will sneak it back to her.” He pulled at his perfect hair, which he never did, while telling me the story the next day. He’d had to argue with her for a good half-bead, balanced on a third-floor windowsill.

It happened six more times. Once he got caught, making me wonder how he could smile as he recounted it. “The girl’s father stamped in and caught me on the window-sill. ‘Skorsas Trinisas!’ he yelled at me. ‘What are you doing here?’ ‘Oh ser,’ I answered, ‘how is it that your superior self know this humble one’s name?’ Of course he couldn’t say a word, especially with her right there. He was one of my old clients.”

†

Around the same time the first box came, the Pages announced with the greatest pomp and most florid writing that Kurkas had a second son. I wondered how that would go over with his first son, since in the Imperial family brothers are perhaps each other’s worst danger; Kurkas had certainly proved that by disposing of his own brothers. A few days after that I got a letter from Minis.

I cannot come to visit you, even now more than before. I know this is… I don’t know how to ask. How do I deal with a baby brother?

Father has picked me a baby brother and named him Ilesias. I’m frightened. Do you think Father is thinking of replacing me? He gave the baby the best name, after Ilesias the Great. He was born on a respectable day, Risae 1, not a joke day. His name isn’t a joke.

(That was referring to Minis’s own name being Sinimas, a common Aan name, rendered backwards, a whim of Kurkas’s because he’d been born on Diem Wards Back.)

Father presented him to me today and I had to hold him and he peed on me and Father laughed. I… had a tantrum and screamed at everyone in my rooms after. I have to say sorry to you to for losing my temper, when I promised I wouldn’t.

How do I… bear… a little brother? What is the right thing? I don’t know. Father… I don’t know if he ever had brothers. I’m going to check that. But Father killed Grandfather. I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel with a little brother. Could you help me, please?

Your devoted fan,
Minis

His footservant was waiting for me after training to write a reply. How could a question that would be so simple in Yeola-e that no one would even think of asking it, be so complicated somewhere else?

I took my time writing it, again feeling that in some part I had the fate of Arko, and thus the world, in my hands. “My first thought is, love him,” I wrote, “but I know it is not so simple for you, because you fear your father might replace you with him. So give him no cause to fear you, and he won’t see you as a threat.” I wrote this hoping it was possible; how far beyond reason Kurkas’s fear of his son might be, I could not know. We hadn’t talked about Minis over dinner.

“For all there is just cause for your anger,” I went on, “don’t take it out on people who are not to blame. You needn’t apologize to me, but you should to them. Your little brother has no more chosen this than you have, so don’t do him injustice. And if you are worried that he might one day act against you, the best defense against that is to love him. If those who are too close to him are removed, but you treat him lovingly, you will win his unending loyalty. You and he are brothers not only in blood, but in adversity.” And I signed and sealed it, laying a kiss on the hardening wax. There is little good I can still do; may this be some.

That night, as sleep began to take me, I thought absently, it’s odd how my mind feels off-kilter more and more these days, as if it’s been stirred with a ladle and left to fall almost back into its old pattern, but not quite. Funks were unavoidable in this place; apparently needing it, I did my own observance again, meditating on my knees with my crystal in my hand.

But then as I lay down again, and found it unchanged, I thought, no. It’s too even, too consistent; it doesn’t have the changes, like clouds crossing the sun on a ragged-sky day, of moods. It’s been more than five moons; the Pharmacist said I’d noticed the first slight effects in a half-year.

It’s the grium.

My mouth went dry and sour, and sweat broke out sparkling cold all over me. At first I tried to fight off the fear; then, same as the eve of the fight against Riji, I let it take me, until it was done with me. Huge beyond imagining. When would it end?

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136 - The shining torch of Lightningism

In Arko, it is respectable, though difficult, to be a widow. Your wealth is held in trust by your late husband’s nearest male kin, for your second husband if you remarry, or your eldest son when he comes of age. But Sora was no widow; she was my wife.

Divorce is utter dishonour for a wife; since the house is the man’s she is expelled to beg the mercy of her kin, who consider her a burden. What becomes of the children is entirely up to the man. It’s perfectly legal for him to sell them into slavery, if he wants, and even in my short time in Arko, I’d heard of cases.

Yet if I left things as they were, she and her sons would either be abandoned when I went home, or claimed by the fighter who killed me, until his killer claimed her, and so on, passed on from man to man of who knew what character until one made fifty, or more likely for the rest of her life. By Arkan law, the best I could do for her was kill myself.

Skorsas found me an advocate who was understanding. Searching through his books he found some obscure ruling whereby a husband could declare himself unfit, giving the wife a widow’s standing, with a trustee managing her things until a kinsman came forward. Being from Tor Ench, Riji had no male kin here, and, it turned out, was estranged from those at home; so two old friends from the University offered to act as the trustee until Younger Riji, as the eldest of the two sons was named, came of age.

The more elderly of the two friends, an old cobweb-head of a scholar who felt he should get it by rights, spoke of “that empty-headed woman” and wondered with a scheming look what use she might have, while the younger seemed to have been her friend as well as his. I signed everything over to him by proxy and thus her.

I gave up my notion of borrowing books; it would have forced her to see me. But, try though they might, they couldn’t talk me out of freeing the three slaves and thus elevating them to okas. It turned out she did have enough money to pay them a living stipend, though they all left, to be replaced by other okas. I had a feeling Riji had not been the kindest master.

“It is a tragedy to us all, though not to you,” the trustee said, superior-to-inferior, in the way of Aitzas, when we were done all the paperwork. (There seems to be five times as much in Arko as Yeola-e, for any transaction.) “We all tried to persuade him not to return to the Ring. Especially Sora.” I wondered if that had just been out of love, or she’d had a touch of foreknowledge. “Yet I must add, you have been very gracious, young man, much more so than we expected from a Yeoli.” I thanked him. That was all I’d wished for.

So I was finished with his affairs. Or so I thought. “You seem to have forgotten,” Skorsas said, at my elbow, as I was pocketing my Arkan pen. “You also have a position at the University as a professor of philosophy.” By the sacred tenet of “who kills, becomes,” I was qualified for the work. The contract was in among the other papers; Diverse Foreign Philosophy, it read, and a bonded post, which meant, in Skorsas’s straightforward words, “If you can do it, they can’t dismiss you.”

“What am I to do?” I said. “Go there and teach?” I meant it as a joke, but neither Skorsas nor the trustee laughed. Then the idea seized me. A teacher, in Azaila’s terms, which I followed, is one who knows something the student does not, and it struck me I likely knew quite a few things of foreign philosophy which Arkans wouldn’t.

So I went to the University, found my way to the Halls of Thought, and found the person who was my superior there so as to declare that the Diverse Foreign Philosophy classes, which had been canceled, could go on. I sometimes think this was the first sign of the effects of the grium sefalian.

Said superior I knew immediately: the elder of Riji’s friends, whom I had spurned as a trustee. He was pop-eyed at first, but did not for a moment try to convince me I wasn’t qualified; instead, he turned all to courtesy, showing me to Riji’s office, handing me the schedule (in Arkan, of course) and introducing me to my two assistants, who were both over thirty and held doctorates. I saw by the smile in his limpid grey eyes, his plan: to throw me to the wolves and see how long it took them to spit me out.

My first scheduled class was the next day. First standing in the lecture hall in Riji’s robes, which fit me, I saw the wolves. Thin-shouldered, beady-eyed, all men, with gold-wired spectacles and gold bracelets and waist-long Aitzas hair, they leaned back in their chairs, dangled their feet over empty ones, looked down their noses at me with the assured smugness of those who know they will one day be an Empire’s ruling elite. They were all at least five years my elder, probably ten years more educated, and a hundred to my one. Whether they knew I was Chevenga or just Karas Raikas, I wasn’t sure, but I suspected it would make little difference. This was a doctoral class.

Still, they’d never come through the Assembly Palace’s schooling in debate, or the forge of Azaila’s teaching; and if they thought to intimidate me, they forgot what I faced each fight-day. I remembered Azaila’s way on the mountain, of tossing us this way and that with his wisdom until our heads were spinning, and enlightenment came.

I started with, “You must excuse my poor Arkan, gentlemen; I was taught only recently. Arko has only been on our border since the 1474th year of our reckoning, so my tutors felt Arkan was an upstart language.” That struck them speechless long enough for me to tell them I was here not only to teach them Diverse Foreign Philosophy, but to make them think, perhaps as they never had before, and so forth.

What I found was that they were not really used to talking very much; apparently the tradition in the University of Arko was more for professors to deliver an even, spiritless and endless string of words into the ears and so into the mindlessly-note-taking hands of the students, with the students occasionally asking for clarification. So I told them they could speak freely, and then told them they must speak freely, and then assigned them to speak whether they wished to or not, making them debate each other, then switch positions. I had each of them tell me what aspect of foreign philosophy he knew nothing at all about, and then had each of them discourse on that topic for a tenth-bead. And at the beginning and the end of each class I had them meditate, something they had never heard of, even though it is integral to the philosophies of many peoples.

They didn’t all like it. I recall the man who stamped out, wanting only to ingest knowledge, never use it, and the one who, near the end of a bead of cut-and-thrust debate, asked in a beleaguered tone, “Professor Lightning, ser, is this going to be on the exam?”

They went away dazed and laughing, both; at the next class there were half again as many, the one after that, double. I understood: all these staid, stiff dogmas, unchanging for two hundred years and always given in the same drab voice by the same drab codgers, bored them silly, as such things will the young; my teachings, whatever they were, came to them like a splash of cold water in the face. I taught every other day—it gave me something to do in the mornings other than read—and within an eight-day, all through the University taverns, it was Lightningism and nothing but.

I would let them write their essays on whatever they wished, no matter how unconventional; I gave authorization to enter the Third Portal of Propriety—that limited to professors and students they allow—to anyone who asked, for any book. Several times they were convened by my superior on the matter of my incompetence; always they spoke in my favour, some nine to one. (Aitzas in Arko are permitted a slight taste of the vote, other than with kerchiefs in the Mezem.) I’d tell them to come to the Mezem and cheer for me, if they liked my teaching; when essays were due, they’d vow to cheer for the other.

It all went well and was great fun, until someone tattled on me to the Marble Palace for sowing subversion. We’d wandered from philosophy to society to politics to Yeoli politics, somehow, and someone asked me, to which I had to answer honestly, whether I was indeed the missing king of Yeola-e.

(In case you wonder, as I did, why it had not been proclaimed in the City or the Empire, to lift morale for the sake of the war, or just to let people know the truth, I will say what I found out later: just letting people know the truth was not tradition here, and Kurkas didn’t put himself out to do it, nor was he concerned about morale, being certain of victory.)

That did it; despite howling protests, I was run out of the Halls of Thought within a day. When my students gathered around me in a certain tavern to console and be consoled, I put out the secret word that I would go on with classes in a certain clearing in the woods (well away from where Niku was working on whatever); the Marble Palace couldn’t forbid that.

So the shining torch of Lightningism was kept burning. Some fifty stayed with me until I could teach no longer.

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135 - Her husband's killer

The next morning light was more visible, and less painful, again. As Skorsas salved my cuts, he said, “We’ve got to deal with the spoils, Shefen-ka.”

“Spoils?” I’d forgotten, no doubt because my mind shied from the implications: a fighter is entitled to all the possessions of the man he has killed. When Mana had killed Suryar, he’d acquired a roomful of clothes good enough for princes, none of which fit him, a house in the solas quarter, five slaves including three concubines, and a horse. He’d freed the slaves and sold everything else.

Riji had been even richer than Suryar. Without intending it, I now was a slave-owner. I could imagine what could be made of that, if it ever got back to Yeola-e.

But he’d been married, which I thought would make it simple. “Manumit the slaves and sign everything else over to his wife,” I told Skorsas.

“To his wife?” he said now. “You bizarre Yeoli. She’s a woman. She’s spoils herself, so are his children. You’re her husband, and their father. You could sell them all to brothels, as any man can do with his wife and his children if he so feels. Do you want to do that?”

Who kills, becomes. Already weakened, I felt nausea come up faster than it should. I could imagine her, a delicate Aitza woman, in her house with the two little boys gathered near her, waiting to find out their fate from her husband’s killer.

It would have to start with knowing what I had. I sent Skorsas for Riji’s books. It turned out he’d hired out his accounting, so I called in the accountant. I saw in a moment even without my eyes that he was looking to bilk an ignorant woman and a slow-witted barbarian out of whatever he could; it started with his trying to charge me for this visit. I dismissed him right then and there.

The next day my sight was back enough that I could be up and around, with the dark spectacles on; the day after that I could, with some pain, check the figures. Luckily it was all in Enchian, and the bankers Riji had dealt with used that tongue.

His funeral was the day after that. The notice in the Pages said only those he had known were welcome; he had known me, so I went. I’ve been asked many times why I did, when he had brought me, and thus Yeola-e, so close to grief, for no good reason. My answer is simply that he was a fighter I killed. I would have gone to the funeral of every fighter I killed, had they been held. His was the only one.

I wore my hooded cloak, and let no one else see me when I greeted the man who held the temple door. He looked at me as if I were a child-raper, and drew breath to cry out, to guards perhaps. “Think, if you reveal me, what a scene this will be,” I whispered, fast. Behind me, there were three writers trying to wangle their way in. “You’re his friend, I understand; I will hide in the gallery and make absolutely sure no one sees me. Second Fire come if I lie.” With lips pressed tight, he said, “Very well, sword-buck. But take good care. If a hair of you is seen, I’ll have you murdered. Don’t think I don’t have ways.” I just nodded, and he let me in.

As the saying goes, nothing reveals a person so well as his funeral. Elegies were spoken by his philosopher colleagues, by Koree, by the Mezem writer Roras Jaenenem; but no living fighters, or boys. His paintings lined the wall, the music and verses were all ones he had written; one had to marvel.

His corpse was covered to the neck, and wore a wig that matched his hair, to hide its desecration. A wreath of chains, fifty-eight no doubt, shone on the shroud, though the original ones had surely been snatched; someone was spending, out of love.

By the many words of sympathy addressed to his wife, I learned her name was Sora. That was the last word he’d said. The man who was the intellectual and the beast by turns had turned purely into the man, in the end.

I slipped out before the rite was finished, so as not to be seen by others forming the processional to the burying-yard, which was outside of the city.

To my mind, Sora would be better off never seeing my face again; but Skorsas assured me that she expected me, and in fact until I spoke to her in person, would live in fear. So I steeled myself, and went to the house, borrowing two Mezem guards to beat off the fans.

It was a medium Aitzas place, but all Enchian inside, the woodwork plain and dark, a sweet spice incense in the air, the walls full of paintings, most in the style that I had come to know was his, though I could not see them well through the dark grey of my spectacles.

Everything was quality. I was shown into the great-room with all courtesy by the butler. Their hair blackened entirely with mourning dye, Sora and her sons came in. With her eyes down, never on me, she knelt at my feet; the two boys stayed back, silent, the younger clutching the arm of the elder, who was about ten, and had Riji’s face in small. I remember the look, when his eyes, of the same pale green, met mine: “When I come of age, you are dead.” True enough, I thought; I would be.

They were out of school for this appointment. “Let them miss no more of their learning,” I said. A slave appeared instantly to attend them, with a bow to me as to the master of the house, and Sora and I were alone.

She had the flawless ivory skin, jewel-blue eyes and slender ankles of an Aitzas woman whose family have been breeding for the Arkan ideal of beauty for centuries; no doubt her hair was brilliant white-blond under the dye. She wore a deep red satin dress with roses embroidered in gold and green thread that clung close to her slender body and was one piece with her gloves. It was buttoned primly tight at the neck. I couldn’t imagine her father had preferred this marriage, to a foreigner; perhaps she was a fourth or fifth daughter and he’d run out of eligible men from other Aitzas houses. And yet Riji had loved her, to his last breath.

“Perhaps your mighty self wishes refreshment, husband,” she said to me, still keeping her eyes downcast. “In that cabinet is nakiti.” It was Kiaji’s, the finest. While women serve men food in Arko, the privilege of pouring nakiti is a man’s. I poured two cups, handed her one, and threw back half of mine in one draught. That might be the only way I could get through this.

“Take a chair, and drink… and look at me… or not… whatever you wish,” I said, wanting none of it to be a command. She sat quickly but stiffly, like a soldier obeying. “My intention…” I threw back the other half. “…is that you and your children should lose nothing, and live in no less comfort, except… that which cannot be replaced.”

I waited for her to say something, but she did not. At the first sip of nakiti, she sputtered and gasped and said wretchedly, “Forgive this miserable one.” She had indeed taken my permission to drink as command. It had never occurred to me this might be the first nakiti in her life. “It’s all right, you don’t have to.” She put down the cup with relief.

I went on about investments and liquid assets and manumitting the slaves but keeping them on for a wage, or hiring someone else if one or more of them left, and how I would give her my own money if there were no other way. To my own ears my voice sounded distant, and my words hopelessly lame. She didn’t answer a word. Of course, I thought, this is all men’s business. Why hadn’t I brought Skorsas? I wasn’t sure how we’d do it; Riji’s Mezem gold had all gone to the house, books and art, of which I’d just promised to sell none; it was on his professor’s pay he’d sustained the family, including the education and war-training of his sons.

What I could not bring myself to raise, she did. “This one prays, husband,” she said with her eyes hidden behind the black locks of hair, “your mighty self finds her pleasing.” One could not imagine a murmur in a voice more cold and weak. Sickness cut through the nakiti-glow; I itched to dash out the door, and never think of this again.

“It’s death, not love, that binds us,” I said. You’d rather die than touch me, I wanted to say, and I can understand that; but by Arkan law she must not feel that, so on my lips it would be an accusation. “As I said, I will not make you suffer,” I said, finally. “You needn’t worry about that.”

She nodded tightly, and said, “Perhaps your strong self wishes to see what is his.” Not knowing what else to do, I followed her. In my discomfort, I’d drunk enough nakiti to be slightly unsteady.

Only in the library did I want to linger. His collection was as impressive as you’d expect. There is nothing else I want here, but let me at least read these books. I had no wish to look into the children’s rooms, or hers. She didn’t show me the kitchen as a matter of course, that being a woman’s place.

Is it because it is the man’s places she’s showing me, I thought, that Riji’s presence seems everywhere? In his studio, which had a great window to let in light, stood an easel with a painting of a battle scene, that would now never be finished. Beyond that was a gallery full of portraits, some sketched, some in full oils, of fighters.

Sora ventured to speak unbidden. “When he killed them,” she said, “he’d hang them here.” I didn’t know what this meant in full until we went to his room. There, next to the bed, where one should put the image of a loved one, hung a painting, based on the sketch he’d done, of me.

I forgot courtesy; or perhaps felt I deserved an answer. “Why did he do this?”

Her gloved hands pulled at the hem of her peplum. “This one is only a woman, husband, who knows nothing of art and swordcraft.”

“Did he ever say anything… that you heard?”

“To concentrate his attention, he said. If he could paint a man, he could capture his spirit, and so beat him. So he said.”

I lifted it in my hands, and held it for a long time, gazing. Finally I said, “I would take nothing else from you. But this, you cannot want. May I?” Casting her eyes down, she said, “Why does your great self ask? This one will wrap it.”

Without the nakiti which had turned her cheeks bright red, I doubt she would have asked what she did then.

“This one didn’t think your mighty self would want it… why?”

Not knowing what else to do, I answered, “It captures my spirit.”

“Not well enough,” she whispered under her breath. Then looking up, knowing I’d heard, she covered her mouth with her hands in dread.

“It’s great art,” I said. “I’m sorry, did you say something?” She shook her head, and her slip of the tongue was a stone vanished in a dark pool.

As I was leaving, with the painting under my arm, I considered apologizing and asking forgiveness, for everything. But it seemed too insufficient to try, and none of it had been my fault in the first place.

In the end, as she had finished her formal goodbye, I just said, “I chose this no more than you did,” forgetting that one bereaved wants to blame someone other than the lost.

“This one will do her duty,” she said thickly, her eyes down again, “whatever your victorious self decrees that to be. But forgive this one for what is beyond her strength. This one will always hate your magnificent self.”

She saw me down to the doorstep. Now was the time to say it, so I would be able to turn and go, sparing her from my presence if tears seized her. “I should tell you the last word he said. It was your name.” I spun on my heel on the doorstep and walked away fast, making the Mezem guards stretch their stride to keep up. I heard only one faint strangled sob.

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134 - Extract of nothingness

The first time I spoke the name Norii Maziel, the sentence also had the word “fik” in it. Skorsas hadn’t yet told me that he was the one who’d swear to write and publish all I’d said.

Blindness had made my other senses keener, even in this short time, as blind people will tell you it does. By the way he sat in the stool beside my bed, I could tell he was neither a heavy nor a careless man. He smelled as if his clothes were kept in chests or closets with sprigs of lavender. His voice was middle-aged and gentle, and he had the delicate city Aitzas accent, that softens the t’s and tz’s and d’s, lightens the vowels and has a slightly musical rhythm. That was odd; all other writers were fessas. He can afford to write truth, I thought. I found myself wishing almost fervently I could see his face.

I took my answers off down my own path almost as soon as I opened my mouth, and could barely believe it when his pen didn’t stop scratching, even as I said the Mezem ravaged and despoiled all who entered it and was a boil betraying the corruption running through every vein and nerve of Arkan society.

He confessed to me he’d barely seen a Mezem fight in his life and didn’t know what to ask, so I gave him all the pat answers; I’d never let them ask me the questions myself, but I knew them well enough from overhearing other fighters answering. When that was done, just as I was thinking, “I’ve been had; he’ll leave now,” he turned the subject back to corruption. He didn’t protest or even calmly deny, only listened and wrote and now and then asked me to clarify. I began to think he either was a spy, or agreed with me.

We spoke for a good two beads, until I was starting to fall asleep and so beginning to mix gibberish in with my sense, and Iska obsequiously chased him out on Skorsas’s prompting, both of them worried that he’d quote the gibberish. What I most remember is him saying, as he left, “You don’t belong here,” and answering, “And who, other than those who choose to, does?”

He told me he would write the account of the fight for the Pages and the Watcher, as he’d promised, but he wanted to speak with me more. I found myself agreeing.

I still could not see, other than the vaguest light, which hurt like looking into the sun, but Iska said I should sleep without the bandages and just an eye-patch. He’d got a pair of spectacles for me, which he told me were darkened, so that once my sight came back I’d be able to see through them without them letting in enough light to hurt my eyes.

†

“Kaina marugh miniren, why doesn’t the world leave us the fik alone?”

Skorsas’s voice cut through my sleep like a knife. Someone was tapping on the door. He turned obsequious. It was Minis. “I promise I won’t wake him long! Or drag him out into the city!”

“Small victories,” Skorsas muttered under his breath, as he slipped out. Light from the wall-torches outside stabbed my eyes, until I groped on the night-table, found the spectacles and settled them on my nose, the wires cold and a little pinching behind my ears. I could see nothing clearly, but at least the lamp that Minis brought in didn’t cause me agony.

He set it on the night-table and flung himself into my arms, then pressed his ear against my chest. He wanted to hear that my heart was still beating. I pulled his head in closer with my hand. “I’m sorry for letting him get so close,” I whispered.

“It wasn’t your fault!” Spoken like a person without war-training.

“Of course it was,” I said. “My mistake, my fault.” He just clung, wanting neither to accept nor disbelieve. He was wearing far less jewelry than usual, oddly; mostly he was covered in the watery smoothness of silk.

“Are you getting Skorsas to read to you?” he asked. A boy after my heart, I thought, understanding how important books are.

“No. Arkan strategy and tactics doesn’t interest him, so I’m not subjecting him to them.”

“Wild Untamed Heart is a pretty good book,” he said helpfully. “Or Ripped Gloves.”

“Ripped Gloves?” I kept my laughter in. “These sound… too old for you, in Arko.”

“I get them from First Amitzas’s bookshelves,” he said. The Imperial Pharmacist read trashy fessas-quarter romances? I tried to imagine those stone-dead eyes running over melodramatic and heated words, and couldn’t do it. “I didn’t think it was plausible that the hero kept getting his gloves ripped off every time he turned around, though.”

“I imagine you’re trying to learn something about sex that isn’t from your father,” I said. “Wise inclination. The less you learn about it from him the better, in my opinion.” He didn’t say yes, but he tightened his arms around me in a way that let me know he knew the truth of this.

“He’s still going to ransom you, he says,” he whispered, half into the skin of my chest.

“Was he worried when it looked like he was losing that?”

“Not really.” Bless your honesty, child. “He said it was good either way.” I felt the wet warmth of a tear. “Raikas… this is getting harder and harder…”

“Lad! Think!” I said. “If I can take Riji, who can I not take? Hmm?”

He’d nearly fallen out of his box when Riji had taken me down, he told me; one of his Mahid had had to catch him by the back of his kilt. He clung again like someone lost at sea. You are everything to me, his arms said. He’d almost lost all the love he had in the world; from who else was he permitted it?

“I didn’t see how you could win when you were…” He trailed off, not knowing how to say it, or perhaps overly concerned that he’d insult me.

“When you’re fighting you don’t really notice pain,” I said.

He asked me also how I’d known where Riji was. Since the Ring mavens could hardly have failed to notice, I’d told Norii just that I had a gift; now I told Minis the same. That reminded me; I didn’t weapon-sense any Mahid tubes staying unearthly still outside the door. “Where are your Mahid?”

“I… em…” His tone became that of any child caught in mischief, rather than a child who whose power was second only to one other’s in the empire. “I sneaked out without them,” he said in a half-whisper.

As if he were any child caught in mischief, I reprimanded him, albeit gently. It turned out two boys had chased him. “They might have slit your throat, just to steal all this silk your wearing, and make sure you couldn’t tell and describe them to the Sereniteers.” Having had Mahid shadowing him all his life, he had no idea that anyone would even think such a thing. “Who’s going to take you back to the Marble Palace?” He had a plan to borrow a guard or two from the Mezem. I made him swear never to do it again also, though he did so in tears. It meant that he couldn’t visit me.

We talked of the fans then, and what they saw in me. “Someone to emulate,” he said. “A champion of what they see as good.” You are speaking for yourself as much as them, I thought. If I have done that for you, I have accomplished something for all the world.

Though he knew he should go—they might be ripping out their hair at the Marble Palace, since who knew what fate would befall whoever was caught letting him get out of their sight—he kept coming up with other topics, as pretexts to talk longer. Fans had broken the mirror at the Puckered Fig, he told me, and he and his betrothed had had to hide under a table. She had been watching the fight, which made me think that my privates were perhaps the first male’s she’d ever seen.

“She’s two years older than me, and she already looks like a grown woman,” he said. “I’m not going to get my growth for years.” So seamlessly, he shifted in and out of being an average boy.

“That’s how it is, girls grow up first,” I said. “Not fair, but that’s life. You have a way to go before you get truly randy.”

“If randy is what Ilian did, I don’t want anything to do with it,” he said.

“That’s not randy; that’s toadying. Randy is wanting to do it with someone who wants to do it with you too. It starts in the eyes...” He was listening rapt, by his stillness. “See what I mean? With Ilian it wasn’t there at all. You look at them, they look at you… there’s a certain look. To look is to imagine… to look is to touch with the eyes.”

“I like looking at her,” he said, with a touch of dreaminess. There is the beginning of it, I thought. He was eleven. “I feel like a little boy next to her. I was dreaming of her when… when Ilian did what he did… and ruined it.”

“When will you marry her… third threshold? That’s lots of time to grow. I’m about that old, twenty-one.”

“I’d rather skate than think about sex.” Though I had not skated as he had, these words somehow brought back a vivid sense of the time I’d been the age, drawn both to childhood games, and adult desires. How sweet life was then, I thought, when the Mezem had been nothing more to me than a legend. “I keep saying I should go, and then starting to talk again.” I could sleep in until noon if I wanted, I told him, so no matter. He acceded to his own discipline, then, knowing that if we both fell asleep with him on me, the Marble Palace would be in an uproar. I kissed him on the forehead. I kept thinking I wouldn’t see him again, and yet somehow he always seemed to come back.

†

I should add the one bit of the tale of my fight with Riji that remains, though I didn’t find it out for myself until days later. I asked Iska idly what sleeping-drug he’d given me the night before, that had an effect so natural. He grinned.

“Extract of nothingness, we called it,” he said. “The Haian term, I think, is placebo.”

-

This scene from Minis's point of view

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133 - Life is Everything

Excerpt from Life Is Everything (unexpurgated version), by Norii Maziel Aitzas, Workfast Literary in Arko, Ye. 1552 / 55^th-to-last Year of the Present Age

I never expected the editor of the Watcher of the Ring, Akam Hinnias, to come to me frantically. “There’s a ring-fighter who says he’ll only speak to a writer who will write the entire truth of what he says, on his hope of Celestialis. Everyone in the Pages Mezem section and Watcher of the Ring staffs has chickened out, and now the black-haired foreign scruff is laughing that he’s not surprised. But I still need the story. I thought immediately of you.”

I gave the appropriate answer. “A sword-swinging backwoods barbarian insults every writer in the Mezem, and you want me to talk to him? Why don’t you just give him what he deserves, an invitation to Hayel?”

“Because he’s Lightning Loner,” said Akam, “and he just beat Riji the Mangler. It’s the Mezem story of the decade. Someone has to get something out of him.”

*

I am not war-trained. I don’t follow the Ring. I know next to nothing about it. I went to two or three fights on special occasions as a child. I wouldn’t know a thresher defence from an axe-cut if it nicked me in the nose. I decide I will just ask him how he did it, faithfully take down every word I can understand and then contritely check the facts and spelling with real Ring-scribes afterwards.

There is an utterly justified sense of indignation mixed in with the naked envy on their faces, as I pass their positions in the Mezem colonnade the evening after the fight, to meet the newly-throned pug. All I can do is cast apologetic looks. I didn’t even see it.

The inside of the Mezem is a world outside the world. It is furnished in faded Piinanian glory, all smoked mirrors and gilded curlicues suggestive of a more delicate and refined age.

Its residents dye their hair green or purple or rainbow, file their teeth to points, wear rings through parts of their bodies that cannot be mentioned in a decent publication, walk openly with naked hands and hairy torsos, yell across the genteel atria in barbaric tongues.

A primitive with animal bones lashed to his arms reclines on a master-crafted Aatzorian chair, playing chess on a gold-plated set, against a coal-black creature wearing nothing but an odd agglomeration of leather straps. An obscenely-muscled brown woman wearing nothing but an eye-stabbing orange slip of cloth wrapped loosely around her body strides purposely towards the glass-doored exit. The Mezem staff dotes on the fighters like faithful valets the beloved sons of a noble household.

The place smells of sweat, incense and ancient woodwork. The corridor to the fighters’ rooms is defaced with scribbles and scrawls in indecipherable script painted or smeared over the restrained Piinanian woodwork. Iskanzas Muras, fessas, the healer and de facto chief, sends one of the ubiquitous Mezem boys to lead me down it.

There is some negotiation, between this boy and Skorsas Trinisas fessas, Lightning Loner’s boy, whose drunkenly-free tongue at a Mil Torii Itzan party famously induced Riji to return, fatally, to the Ring. “First thing, before he’ll say a word, your illustrious self must say the oath,” I am firmly told. “In front of him.”

I am shown into a small simply-furnished room, its walls festooned with tributes, cards, ribbons and medallions, which barely hide the tally-scrawls in the stone where centuries of fighters have kept track of how many fights they won and survived. I prepare to meet the new-crowned king of the sweaty blood-clan, the toughest of the human pit-bulls, the one who loves truth.

We tend to think of Ring-fighters somewhat like tools: either stonily indestructible, when they prevail, or useless and to be forgotten, when they fail. It hasn’t occurred to me that Lightning Loner, injured severely enough to fall in the Ring the day before, might still be recovering.

He lies in bed, half propped up on pillows, his eyes covered with bandages so that he is entirely blind. Skorsas hovers nearby, ready to serve as his eyes and hands, as well as offering me tea, nectar, wine or anything else I might desire during the interview, in the Mezem tradition of grandiose hospitality.

I am familiar, after an afternoon of hurried research, with engravers’ renditions of the famous features: the wild shock of black Yeoli curls, the square brow, the sharp chin. What I did not know was how engravers idealize his size—or perhaps it is my own imagination, scaling him up to match his Ring reputation. Lightning Loner is not a tiny man, from what I can tell, but of average height, which makes him smaller than most fighters.

Nor is he nearly as rude and rough-cut as I expected, as I find once I have made the oath to his silent, impassive-faced witness and we begin our conversation. Though I was thoroughly warned by my colleagues of his offensive habit of speaking to everyone from slaves to nobles as equals, no matter how much respect he ought to pay or be paid, I certainly did not expect this to be offset by a straightforward civility so genuine and unfailing it makes me feel awkward. Nor did I expect him to be capable of speaking Enchian as flawless as any scholar’s, or his answers to have a grace and dry wit, undercut with humility, that one would more expect to hear at a diplomatic function than in the lair of the blood-mongers.

Lightning Loner speaks Arkan very fluently, for the short time he’s been learning it, as well as a passable Lakan, and his native tongue. He is better informed on world affairs than most Arkan nobles. He has a shelf full of Enchian and Arkan books on general-craft, politics, Arkan history and various other subjects; his night-table is heaped with more. He thinks before he speaks, and when he doesn’t, his answers still sound as if he had; when he is painfully blunt, it’s due to his refusal to gloss over the hardship of his circumstances to soothe Arkan audiences. If he had no reason to be blunt, if his Arkan speech were not fessas-accented and shot through with the mannerisms of the Mezem, because he learned it from Skorsas—if he were not here—one could easily think he is a foreign prince on a state visit.

So I wrote before I knew what was already an open secret in the Mezem: Lightning Loner and Fourth Shefen-kas Shaeranoias, the head of state of Yeola-e, were one and the same. But with me, he brushed off the matter of his true identity and the implications it raises. That was not the truth he wanted to tell Arko.

I came to him bearing a certain amount of annoyance and cynicism. I soon find it melted away. We tend to think of ring-fighters as brutes and thugs, albeit elevated ones, with no purpose or ambitions, no desires or memories, outside the Ring. We only see them fight, ferociously; we do not see them brood, or dream, or lie awake on their pallets thinking of home. We take their violence as their nature, their ferocity as willing. We forget that it is, in all but a few cases which serve well to sustain the misconception, forced upon them. Like all slaves, they must do the work given them or face punishment, which, to compel them to do this particular work must necessarily be severe: death by torture.

What I learn, at his every word, is that the man we know as Lightning Loner holds the opinion that the life of all living beings as sacred, and, therefore, no death should be entertainment.

Yet he cuts, thrusts and kills to the cheers of the crowd, fight-day after fight-day, because he has no other way to return to his life beyond the Mezem. A man of delicate sensibility forced to do what he despises, he wages a constant, deeper, all-pervading battle against shame, anguish and, ultimately, the despair that will cause a crucial slip in the Ring, and reduce the sum total of all his struggles to nil. Nor is he alone, he says; forced to be less than human, every ring-fighter strives, day in, day out, to maintain his humanity.

That is the true story of the ring-fighter’s life, the story that Loner wants Arko to know, if Arko is to know anything of him. It has never been mentioned, however, in the Pages or the Watcher, considered trivial, perhaps, or unsuitable to the sporting spirit of the Mezem and the tastes of Mezem followers. No writer has ever done a long article about him, all frightened off by the depth and insistence of his discontent, and his unwillingness to conceal it. After all, what Arkan wants his afternoon’s pleasant diversion intruded upon and tarnished by anything so grindingly sad?

But Lightning Loner has far more to say than that. The citizens of any culture, immersed in its ways as we all are necessarily, become blind to its warts, oblivious to its self-contradictions, numb to its barbarities. Though Lightning Loner is a savage and therefore cannot understand Arko, some might say, or perhaps has a particularly jaundiced notion of us due to his impression being based on Mezem fans, his observation is unclouded by familiarity, and his eye for fallacies unerring. He and I had barely begun to discuss his fight against Riji when he began offering his insights on Arko and Arkans in general, with an astonishing and merciless clarity.

Who and what we are, especially to the rest of the world, we don’t fully understand, though we have a moral obligation to, Loner contends. The myriad ways in which we impose suffering not just on foreigners, inside the Mezem and elsewhere, but on each other, our fellow Arkans, constantly astonishes him. We would benefit, he feels, by seeing it clearly for ourselves.

That is why Lightning Loner seized upon the first sufficient leverage he had to tell his tale his way. That was the seed of this book.

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132 - He should have won

“I understood from the start,” Skorsas said the next afternoon, when I had slept out. “You are a foreigner, you love women. I always knew that.” His voice was hard and closed, with resignation.

I didn’t disabuse him, nor did I speak my thought, No, it’s that I don’t have sex with children. For one thing, Arkans don’t understand why that is wrong; for another, being so mature for his fifteen years, he didn’t consider himself a child, and so would likely be insulted, in that strange, extreme way that Arkans feel themselves insulted by things which aren’t really insults, so that you always feel you have to tiptoe around them with your words. If I’d been fifteen or even sixteen myself, that would be different; but then of course he would not love me.

Most of what I felt toward him was the sort of bone-deep gratitude you cannot help but have for someone who is utterly steadfast in providing aid and comfort when you are going through a dark time. In the light of that, I could forgive any amount of fussiness, money-mindedness or Arkan weirdness, or even braggadocio, though he hadn’t said a proud word about me to a soul since Riji had returned.

Anhunem came in to check my eyes. I still could see virtually nothing, and light hurt so much it went straight to my stomach again, but he told me not to worry and just keep taking my remedies, as he saw no sign of infection, the worst danger now.

“The writers are on the verge of disemboweling each other with their pens to see you,” said Skorsas, when the Haian was gone. “What shall I tell them?”

Some say I saw a chance. It’s more true that I wanted to throw the rat-pack a fish instead of a fish-head, just to see it stick in their throats. “I’ll speak to the first one who swears on his hope of Celestialis he’ll write, and publish, all I say, and the truth of it,” I said. That would get rid of them.

Sure enough, when he came back, he had no one with him. “They’re going to try to find one,” he said bravely.

I wanted to be up and around at least for a little, so I got Skorsas to lead me out of my room by the arm. He wouldn’t let me put on the faib skates, though. I heard a whisper in Mana’s voice, from his door. “Skorsas… let me take him out into the woods; Cheng, you want to? I’m hiring covered chairs.” Being away from the Mezem would be a balm.

It was tricky; Skorsas insisted on coming at least to the edge of the forest, where Mana and I could be together unseen, so that I would not be alone among strangers, and of course if anyone spotted a hair of me, I’d be enveloped in a slavering crowd in an eye-blink. Soon enough though, my hand was on his bicep and the soft humus of the forest path beneath my feet. Birdsong and the trilling of insects, and once the thumping of the wings of a partridge, were vivid to my ears, as were the smells of pine needles and fungus and long-fallen leaves to my nose.

When we were in what I gathered was our glade, we flung ourselves into each other’s arms. We hadn’t had a chance to, since the fight. “I’m sorry for coming so close,” I said, making him threaten to slap me if I apologized again. “What you said about his evil being what bothered me, I took into the ring,” I said. “I don’t know that I could have won without it.”

By hugging him, I learned he was carrying something, which turned out to be a large jug of wine. “Yes, you celebrated your victory last night,” he said. “But you weren’t with the people you truly want to be with.” Barely a moment later, I weapon-sensed Niku’s two wooden axes. They’d conspired; she had a jug too, sent by some fan who wanted to get inside her pareo, that silk cloth she liked to wear around her hips, of which she had several now, all of brilliant blues or reds or greens or oranges. Everyone in Niah-lur-ana dressed like that, apparently. She had six fights by then; the Director had started treating her like any other fighter, matching her against true opposition.

“I am sorry I misled you, Mana,” Niku said, as he handed out cups and knifed open the jug. “Saying it was a man at home.”

“You were trying to protect him,” he said, and I could tell by his voice he’d turned his face to me when he said him. “I blame no one for anything they do, if it’s for that.”

I heard the trickle of pouring, and the cup grew heavier in my hand. I raised it. “Here’s to Riji Kli-fas. May his soul rest peaceful in All-Spirit.” I could tell they were looking at me oddly, but they both said, “To Riji Kli-fas.” Then they added, respectively, “May he smother forever in Arkan Hayel,” and “May sharks eat his entrails.” I pursed my lips at them, but drank.

“It’s as I said, you needed to kill evil,” said Mana. “I’m glad you raised the sword, and Kurkas honoured it.”

“He was dead anyway,” I said. “I gave it everything I had in that kick, and I felt it was a death-blow.”

“Was it really that close?” Mana said, almost wonderingly. “It looked like a hair plus a whisker.”

“What are you talking about?” I said. “You were watching. Who’d ever think of a kyashin foot-sweep with a chain? I’ve never seen anyone else do that… maybe because no one else could, you have to be so fast and get the timing so perfect… I know, I know. I should have.”

“It was a wind kind of move,” said Niku. She was speaking of Niah fighting styles, of which there are six: Wind, Water, Giant Cormorant, Shark, Dolphin and Boar. I remembered how Riji had made me think of Iyinisa’s use-name, Windsword.

“It was a fight-winning move,” I said. “He had me. He should have won.” I remembered what Iska had said about me not deceiving myself, and was determined not to, about this, however much it grated in the pit of my stomach.

“But there it was—the bad spirit,” said Mana. “If he’d finished you while you were out, he’d have won. He wanted to torment you, so he lost.”

“It was an astonishing move,” Niku said. “Maybe he’d never done it before himself; maybe you lifted it out of him. Here, let me top you up.” The cup got heavier again. I found out later that was true, by asking Koree; he had seen all of Riji’s fights as well as training him, and had never seen the like.

I lay back on the earth, crossed my legs, and turned my face to the sun. Very faintly, it seemed, I saw red. Then I got up again and reached, yearning for touch. Mana and Niku came in on either side, and cradled me between them. I laid my head on her shoulder. “We love you, in our different ways,” Mana said.

“I love you both, in my different ways, too.” I swigged again. “I think I was a wild drunk last night, and am a maudlin one today.”

“He chose, omores,” Niku said, and Mana made a sound of assent.

“Maybe it’s just as well he blinded me, so I didn’t see his wife and kids after he was dead,” I said. “I’d have looked. Yes, yes, I know… he chose. Stupid fikker. They saw me do it… it’s as if he used me against them. He chose the whole kyashin thing, but it’s me who is the villain in their eyes. And now his sons have no father.”

It was partly the wine, this was coming from, I knew. I could feel the heat of it on my cheeks. “Part of how evil he was,” Mana said.

“He was probably a crappy father anyway,” I said. “Maybe they never had him, really, so they lost nothing. He was willing to throw away his life, which is to say, abandon them, for pride.” They both mostly listened. “I know, I know… I’m just trying to assuage my conscience. Maybe he really thought it was best for his sons that their dad stay Living Greatest.”

“You had no choice about any of it,” said Mana.

“Listen to your heart’s brother,” Niku said firmly. “And let it out.”

“What, tears?” I spat. “I have no tears. My eyes hurt too much to cry.”

“You just need to talk.”

“And say what?” Now I found myself angry. “I won. That’s all that should matter. That and my thanks to those who aided me, you two in particular.”

They tightened their arms on me. Perhaps they didn’t think I knew their eyes met over my head, but I felt it. I wondered what conversations they’d had, in between Mana’s propositions. “We’re here, love,” Niku said.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll get my strength back and quit with the maudlin. Being able to see again will help a lot.”

“Yes, you will, heart’s brother.” Niku added, as if I were the badly-wounded warrior again, “Everything will be all right.”

“It was an amazing fight,” I said, after a little. I seemed to be seeing new facets of it; perhaps that was the wine, too. “I’ve never fought so well in my life.”

“And in your soul, you wish you could have touched his, and elevated it,” said Mana. He knew me too well.

“But I couldn’t, and I could feel that.”

“You did the best thing. As I said before: like a mad dog.”

“He did not realize that he must reach above himself, and not below,” said Niku.

“Or just leave well enough alone,” I said. “I didn’t give a shit about whether I was Living Greatest. And I told him that perfectly clearly, right on the training ground: what the boy claimed, I never did. On retrospect, I didn’t kowtow enough.”

That made Mana bristle; I felt it. “You needn’t kowtow to anyone. Certainly not evil.”

“If I’d kowtowed, he’d still be alive and his sons would still have a father. Look, it’s a fikken tragedy, and there’s no way around it.” Well, except one; my cup was light again, so I reached it out vaguely towards Mana, and he filled it.

“You are too good for this place, omores,” said Niku.

“What are you talking about? We are all too kyashin good for this fikken place. I don’t just mean the three of us; look at kevyalin Iliakaj, with three hundred shennen chains…” Since I learned Arkan, wine tends to draw bilingual swearing out of me, if I am angry about something underneath.

We were going around in circles anyway; why were we bothering? Drunkenness was somehow failing to bring its usual cheer, or even numbness. “I think I’m talking like this,” I said finally, “because I’m still tired. I’m sorry.”

“I think it’s how close it was that’s bothering you,” said Mana. “That and the eyes. Chevenga, you’re taking the weight of it too heavily on your heart. There was a hair’s-width between you and death many times in the Lakan war, and each one you shrugged off; remember?”

“I wasn’t semanakraseye then,” I said. “Just a mila, tops. That is the difference. If I get killed here, I never go home and turn things around. That weight is all Yeola-e.”

He couldn’t argue with that. But saying it, and so seeing it clear, somehow relaxed me. I got the yawns all of a sudden, and my head went leaden. The wine was reminding my body, it seemed, that sleep was healing.

“Cheng, sack out,” said Mana. “We’ll keep the bugs, and the fans, not sure which is worse, off you. You’re going to be disturbed less here with us than in the Mezem. And forest air is so much sweeter than city air.”

I lay right down on the earth, the gentlest thing in Arko, with my head on Niku’s lap. She covered me with her cloak. I was gone in a moment, drifting away to the peaceful half-glow of sun between the shadows of leaves on my face and the sounds of their quiet voices.

I slept deep first and then light, and when it was light I heard their words wreathed in around my dreams. “He has foreknowledge sometimes,” Mana said once. “When he predicts what the enemy will do, he always gets it right.” Then she was talking about the Aniah have chocolate mothers, since the time it takes to grow and make is a moon, same as a woman’s blood-cycle. And I was suddenly in Assembly, mediating between two Servants who were debating too hotly, and then looked up to my amazement, to see the gallery full of Mezem fans, some showing red and some showing white. “Omores,” two voices larger than Assembly Hall were saying, “you need to wake up, heart’s brother, you had your chimes rung, remember? Tell me your name.”

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