117 - Because mine was empty

After some thought, I didn’t let Skorsas decide what I should wear, but had him get a semanakraseyeni shirt and kilt tailored; I drew the collar for him. I said black with a white border, but forgot to tell him not to have it made in silk satin with minute ornate black-on-black woven patterns, made on one of those huge Arkan two-man looms. I was fool enough to ask him how much it had cost, and so found out I’d never worn anything so expensive in my life, even armor. For jewelry, I had told him I would wear only the peace-sigil—let Kurkas take that as a reproach—and it couldn’t have any type of metal in it. He settled for diamonds set in black porcelain.

I did see Kurkas, as it turned out, the day before, at my tenth fight. Warming up my limbs, I felt my stomach go tight, when by the bustle in the Imperial Box I knew. It was different than when he’d known me only as Karas Raikas. Now I was the captive king brought in chains at the head of the triumph, and made to dance for my captors; even if the crowd hadn’t known, which of course those who read the Pages did, it would have been enough that he and I did. Even letting him see my skill chafed, here where it was no threat to him.

I put it all out of mind—as fighters say, slip of mind, feed the lions—and did what I must to get out of his sight.

Next day, Skorsas spent all day making me ready, terrified that I make a less than perfect impression, as if that could attain even the end of my list of concerns. With an escort of Mezem guards to make sure fans didn’t make me late, I went to the Marble Palace.

The precautions that surround the Imperator boggle the mind. I went through three anterooms, each richer than the one before. In the first I was stripped, and searched to the skin and deeper, though civilly and with apologies; in the second some ritual was done over me by priests, to purify me sufficiently to enter the Imperial Presence; in the third, I was instructed in how to make the prostration with grace pleasing to the Imperial eye, and warned by a friendly Mahid that the room was studded with spring-darts, their triggers under the fingers of invisible watchers, so that the slightest threatening move would be instant death.

Beside the final door stood a grotesque statue in bronze, of a twisted grinning bald man holding a bowl; the butler who’d led me in whispered, “That’s Lukitzas, honored barbarian. Give him a chain and he will bring you luck in the Presence.” I had brought no money, not having expected to need it. “Touch his head then, and take your chances,” he said. I did, and the door was opened for me.

They were no idle threat, the spring-darts; I weapon-sensed them, built into walls, molding, tables, sculptures, their mechanisms coiled like snakes, aimed everywhere but at the chair where he sat.

I did not do the prostration, nor any obeisance, wanting to see what he would say about it. “Well, here you are!” he said, in jovial Enchian. Close up, if one looked through the finery, he was plain enough, his wide shaven face smooth for fifty, his hair greying a little and thin on top, his eyes the unearthly-brilliant blue that Minis had inherited, contented but with a touch of petulance. Dressed up as a God, but still a man, with moles, a birthmark on his cheek, hair on the backs of his hands under the seals like anyone else’s; one could imagine him a relative of Iska, a mere fessas.

It was more surprising, in this city where even beggars wore gloves, to see his hands up close, naked and pink but for the Imperial seals, which are a bracelet chained to a ring on each hand, all made of gold and jewels, of course. I learned elsewhere that since the Imperator is divine, the Son of the Sun, all parts of him are sacred and need not be concealed, same as the Gods, which is why their statues do not wear gloves; the same for the Imperator’s son.

Knowing how much lay in his hands and on his shoulders, vastly more than a semanakraseye could even imagine, I looked for the mark of it on his face, the furrowed gravity, the peaked look of concern, that must come with such enormous power; but there was only that flat smoothness. His face didn’t look that different, in truth, from his son’s.

“Looking more alive than last time we spoke, I see, even if less honest,” he went on, smiling. So, he had a free tongue, never something to complain of in an enemy; I now knew he’d seen me truth-drugged. “Fourth Shefen-kas. A fine fight that was yesterday; very impressive—I see why my son called you Lightning. I suppose you don’t need to prostrate yourself, by diplomatic protocol we’re equals, aren’t we, in a diplomatic sense, for now; sit down, my boy, sit down, and drink.” I sat, and took up the wine, which was in a vessel of pure glass, on a table of pure glass.

It almost escaped me, what he’d said, so fast had it gone by. For now. By those two words, he’d meant the death of Yeola-e, the enslaving of my people, the smashing of every circle-stone, crystal and sword, all the death and fire, sweat and pain that would take; to me, my ultimate failure, far worse than death. Yet he hadn’t said it to hurt me or put me in fear, else he’d have drawn it out, examining my face. He’d said it absently; he wasn’t even looking.

I had sworn not to be afraid, and had not been. But now my heart went to water, sending chills flowering all over my skin. I took a draught of wine in the hope it would keep me from paling, then put it down so it wouldn’t show the trembling of my hands; but his eyes were on his own glass, which he sniffed. “Yeoli,” he said. It was only by what was left of the taste on my tongue, at first, that I knew he was speaking of the wine. It was from Olinyera. “Fifty years old, they tell me. Many things to offer, your home has. You not the least; you fascinate me. Speak. Shefen-kas… am I pronouncing it right?”

“Not quite,” I said. “It seems particularly difficult for an Arkan tongue.” I began to teach him, but his mind flitted on to something else almost immediately.

To do what I had been thinking of, call him down for betraying me, almost seemed trivial in the face of all this, ill-mannered like bad humor at a party or a child’s sulk; the peace-sigil, a reproach he would not understand, seemed a toy. It was like a dream, my head going light with my own helplessness while the wine sunk hot into my heart. All the time, in the Mezem, I fought off the sense that my whole past life had been entirely fantasy, and only this was real; never had I felt it so strongly as now.

It was remembering words of Mana’s, that shook me out of it. “You are my semanakraseye!” If someone doubts the reality of Hetharin, I thought, let him try running up it. “Kurkas,” I said, forgetting the abasing addresses I’d been taught. “You gave me an oath of safe conduct.” He looked for a moment as if he did not understand me, or had forgotten; then said, “Yes, I did. Of course I did.” For a moment a silence of misunderstanding hung between us.

Since it needed saying, apparently, I said, “You broke it.” In the same even tone, with pale round brows unmoving, he said, “Of course. My Shefen-kas, you gave me such an opportunity, coming here; should I have let it pass?” I sat speechless. Once on a month away I’d been eating dinner with the family when one of the boys, having finished his cup of watered wine, reached for mine and drank a good half. “Why did you do that?” I asked, astonished. With utter innocence he replied, “Because mine was empty.” This was just the same. Whatever I say will touch him as much as it would the polished cliff, I thought. I felt, not chained, for chains can be held to; but dangling in air, my hands grasping at nothing.

He wanted, of all things, to talk Mezem. “You have ten chains now?” he asked. “Before you go into the Ring, Shefen-kas, do you feel fear?” I stared at him, and thought, I stand on one end of the world, and he stands on the other, if it’s even the same world.

It went on this way. I’d been forestalled from getting angry at him, from the start; or perhaps it was that I didn’t know how, in the way one wouldn’t with a creature from another Earthsphere. I found myself humoring him, though it gave me a dull sense of being raped; and we ended up speaking as any gladiator and Ring patron would, about odds and techniques and who looked good.

The food came, course after course of Arkan delicacies, which the servers would announce as they uncovered: hummingbird tongues in saffron sauce, black caviar in red aspic jelly molded in the shape of an octopus swimming in white sauce, ginger sorbet to clear our palates, chocolate truffles with gold-leaf (real gold-leaf, thin enough to swallow). The final course was, for me, a small covered dish of cheese, for him, a naked woman, who, once she’d done the prostration, took his head on her arm and put her breast to his lips. It’s true, was all I could think. He stopped sucking for a moment, to say, “Shefen-kas, what you have is also this, in refined form.” I had to fight down my gorge.

Cheese of human milk—somewhere a child was starving, for this. Will it starve any less, I thought, if I refuse? But Kurkas’s eyes were closed, in happiness, so I fed it all to the three long-haired white cats—blue-eyed, of course—that had been writhing around my legs.

When he was done, kneeling servants had washed our hands and we were alone; we went on to worldly matters. For him, that was Arkan matters; he spoke at length on the spirit of Imperium, of Arko, of which he was the embodiment. I soon got the same measure of him I had when we’d talked Mezem. He had no great intellect, and knew barely anything beyond his borders—what was beyond his borders was unimportant, except that it should soon be within them—but his belief in his own genius was so complete and sound one could not begin to shake it, and in fact found oneself unwilling, as if to do so would be somehow ill-humoured or callous.

I tried to understand him, fighting down the horror, the shock, the hatred, so as to see clear. What I might have taken as disdain just for me, I knew he held for his own son too, from all Minis had told me; I saw also how he spoke to the servants. The best sense I could make of it was that he didn’t hate other people, or even make himself cold to them; it’s that they simply did not exist for him, as people, like himself, as if the part of ourselves that can understand others and feel with them was just absent in him. It made me feel as if I were not there, as if being the Mezem wasn’t bad enough for that.

He was, I realized, the last thing I’d expected him to be: boring. Maybe it was that I was not there for him and so my mind wandered; maybe it was that he had nothing to say that impressed me. It seemed wrong somehow, that the person who was wreaking so much destruction in Yeola-e, and the world, could be dull in conversation; he should be spectacular, somehow, like the malevolent deities in the stories. I wondered if Astyardk had been boring too. Perhaps the greatest evils are always perpetrated by such unexciting people.

Eventually I said, “So what do you plan to do with me?” Since he felt no qualms, perhaps he’d give me a straightforward answer. He did: “Ransom you.”

“But I could get killed in a fight; then no ransom money.” He did the Arkan head-shrug, as if it were entirely natural that I address only his concerns. “Watching you fight grows on me. If you die, it’s good for us too. Shefen-kas, I’ve grown to like you, I won’t have you worrying. I’ll make everything end for the best; trust me.” So, had I revealed myself at the beginning, before he’d seen me fight, I might have been taken out of the Mezem. No use to look back on the stroke of the past.

Soon after that, we made our farewells. Never would I have believed, I thought as I stepped back through the gate, that I would be in any place that made the Mezem seem plain and real.

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