118 - No golden idol gets this done to him

In the Mezem, Skorsas ran to me asking how I was, and should he call Iska; it seemed people sometimes came to harm at Kurkas’s dinners. I just said all was well, asked him not to disturb me, closed my door and doused the candle, so I could kneel in darkness.

I have met someone, I was thinking, whom I understand less than anyone else I have met in my life; whom, by any measure of understanding from the shallow to the deepest, I do not understand at al. If ever there was a call to be the other, it was this.

I meditated for calm. Then I thought of the Marble Palace, still glittering in my memory; of Minis, swaddled in jewels. The son would lead me to the father, again: Kurkas had been raised the same way. I thought of the Mahid, bred to be blind obedience incarnate, the scarlet-armoured armies, claimed to be a rejin of rejin, a thousand thousand, from Tuzgolu to the gates of the great western sea, their wills relinquished to him from birth. I thought of absolute power: no impeachment, no vote, no law to bind him, in fact the laws his to change at a whim; every person who came into his sight falling face-first to the floor; all near him considering him, all of him and all his will, divine.

It took time; my heart shrank back from every step. I am the Imperator of Arko. The Palace, the food, the clothes: he could wear, eat, see, live anything that he could dream and hands could make. I may have all I desire; I always have had all I desired. What I desire and what I have are one. No one ever gainsaid him, no one spoke but what he wished to hear. I am always right; I am the only wisdom in the world. All other thought flows from mine. I am Imperium; I am Arko. Arko’s borders are mine; to expand them is to enlarge myself. For one with absolute power, underlings are as subject as his own body: they are his eyes on the border, his feet on the necks of the peoples he crushes. There are no bounds of property; all that is yours is mine, including you, Fourth Shefen-kas, because all the world is mine. As I sat in darkness my mind rose, soared across the Midworld Sea to a thousand outposts; I saw my hands in Tuzgolu, in Kurkania, in Tebrias, attacking here, trading there, working the whole great device with divine brilliance, as I had been born to do. Nor could he fail; for if he did no one would tell him, blaming anything but him. I am the world; I am perfect; I am God.

But we are all small, I argued with the role. We are blind, we slip, we bleed, in time we die. No human soul is great enough for this. I looked down at my own naked body in the starlight, to see how slight and scarred and dark it was.

To be the other I had imagined the golden seals on my hands, sun-bright and heavy. They were still there; but shining with a light that lived, and so in its subtle faintness was a thousand times brighter and warmer, was my own skin. I felt it as I saw it, bathing me inside as well as out with gold; to know it as myself was ecstasy.

I am Imperium. I am the will of the Gods. All else is training.

What seemed like a fist of wind struck me; I lay on the stone of the floor, face down, gasping, sick and trembling like a vessel of water shaken. For an instant, it seemed, my shape in gold wearing the seals stayed kneeling on the bed, real enough to reach for; then it flashed away and there was only the Mezem darkness with its ever-present sense of defeated ghosts.

“God-In-Me,” I prayed, clasping my crystal, “I understand him: he believes it, entirely. How can he not? For a moment I believed it. But let me die before I do again: for I wanted it.”

†

Two days later, there was a buzz on the training-ground as I went out onto it. A man stood there who was built like a warrior, though with a bit of the spare flesh of age, and from whom everyone else stood well off. He was dressed to train, in just a kilt, and had a swath of gold around his neck that looked like fifty.

The talk hushed some when I stepped out; eyes flicked from me to him and back, tongues whispered, pens scrawled on note-pads. I turned to ask Skorsas if he knew who this was, but, even though he’d been an my elbow a moment ago, he was nowhere in sight.

No matter; I could ask the man myself. As I walked up to him, there was a deep, amazed silence. Everyone seemed to know the bond between him and me, but me.

He was the same height as me, small for a ring-fighter. His face was broad in the cheekbones, like a lion’s, his mane of light brown hair tied back in a club. His eyes were bright green with a touch of gold, and deep-piercing in a way that struck me as half great warrior and half scholar.

As I came close, he let out a dry chuckle. “Well, you’re a brave one, aren’t you?” he said, in native-accented Enchian. Why this was important enough to quote, I couldn’t imagine, but pens scratched.

“If it takes bravery to meet a person, I suppose so,” I said. “I am estimating that is fifty chains you wear, and I’ve never met anyone other than Koree who has won so many, at least in a row. The name I go by here is Karas Raikas; may I ask yours?”

He laughed again, with a bit of amazement, as if this was somehow rich. “Yes, it is fifty chains. Riji Asadji, called Kli-fas.”

“The Living Greatest,” I said. “I have heard a great deal about you, all of it very impressive; I’m pleased to meet you.” It was a lie of civility; I remembered what Iliakaj had told me, that Riji always killed, and cruelly. At the same time, I wasn’t entirely displeased, being intrigued; he’d have something to teach me, I was sure. Training with us for the day? Maybe he’d let me spar him. Probably some of my readers have concluded I was an idiot.

I held out one hand in the Enchian style. There was a bit of a gasp all around the colonnade, and some snickers. It was not good, I began to feel, that he was here.

“I am pleased to meet you, but it would not be appropriate to take your hand,” he said. “I am generally held to be Living Greatest, yes… though not quite by everyone. Might your boy happen to be about?”

“Somewhere,” I said. “He’s made himself scarce for some reason. You want to speak to him?”

“Skorsas!” he barked, as if to a slave or a dog, and then again, more impatiently.

“He is happier to answer if he is addressed more politely,” I said, and called Skorsas myself, adding a “please.” He’d been behind a pillar; now he slowly stepped out, trembling, and would come no closer than two paces away.

“Is it true, lad?” Riji said, in a deadly quiet voice. “Do you hold to it? All Arko read it, at least that is literate.” That was with a flash of his eye at me. It came to me what he was talking about, making my skin tighten all over. Along with the rest, Skorsas had said at Mil Torii Itzan’s party that I could beat Riji Kli-fas.

Kyash, I thought. It’s death to go into the ring fearing the other, so if it came to that, I wouldn’t fear him; yet any difficult fight I could avoid was for the better. Skorsas didn’t answer, frozen.

I said what was true: “If you don’t mind, Living Greatest, I see no cause for quarrel. I did read the article of which you speak, and what Skorsas claimed, I never did.”

He looked into my eyes, past my words. For fear, I think; perhaps, on retrospect, I should have shown some. Every Yeoli warrior should have intent as well hidden as his, and a kick that quick. One moment, it seemed, I was seeing that odd green gaze quizzically considering what to say, and the next I was on the ground, half-curled, in too much pain from between my legs to move.

“You didn’t deny it, either, on the record,” he said. To the writers, I realized that meant, so it would show up in the Pages or the Watcher. I’m still fikken new here, I wanted to say. How was I supposed to know to do that? I couldn’t have said anything anyway, as it was taking everything I had to stifle screaming.

Something long, soft and metal-heavy landed across my head: a silver money-chain. Riji had thrown it there, making the Arkan challenge to a bet; now he stood gazing at Skorsas, who stood like the rabbit before the snake. Well, you’re on your own for now, lad, I thought. I wouldn’t be getting up any time soon.

The writers and oddsmakers and hangers-on waited in the hungry silence that only Arkans seem to get; Skorsas glanced at them, and at me, and at Riji. Then he drew himself up, squared his shoulders, lifted his nose as only an Arkan can, and flicked a silver chain out of his own money-pouch with a flourish. He knelt beside me, and smoothed the two chains together tenderly down over my hair onto my neck. Riji nodded purposefully, and strode away.

“He caught you off-guard,” my boy hissed under his breath as he aided me, feeding me whack-weed, rapping my heels with his fist and so forth. “I said you could take him and I know it is true.”

“I guess you felt that if you retracted what you said, I’d be branded a coward,” I whispered from a strangling throat. “Skorsas, that only matters in war… never mind, it might not have dissuaded him anyway. What you did, you did with great panache.” I had learned the Arkan words that meant the most to him.

Yet even my agony was relief, in some part. No golden idol gets this done to him; the world still was as I’d thought.

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