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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