158 - Life is Everything, redux

I don’t remember the rest of my time in Arko well. It didn’t seem I was mad at the time, at least at first, but then a hand underwater doesn’t look wet. The string of thoughts follows one after the other, like days; but when you look back, imagining half a year as a whole, and you see it as the blackness it truly was, just as the thrusts of history only become apparent much later.

Kyera Shae-Lemana was my thirty-sixth fight. The falling-apart feeling came back, and this time Sasaber couldn’t get rid of it. From then, I remember some utterly trivial things, like a clasp on a belt or the fall of someone’s hair, vividly as yesterday, while major ones, such as being tortured, I remember only the skeleton of.

Some signs of madness were there, though, enough for me to notice at the time: waking up in the morning and finding my hands shaking, for instance, whether flexed or relaxed, no matter how hard I willed them steady. I went to Iska, who pressed them in his own, his palms warm and gentle, like a father’s.

“So far you’ve borne everything,” he said. “What have you clung to? Don’t tell me; ask yourself. Whatever it is, it’s worked; keep clinging to it.” I said, “I don’t know that I have the strength.” He said, “Nonsense. Certainly you do. You know you’re at”—I can’t remember the number—“fights? Better than half”—or was it two thirds?—“Take it one day, one fight at a time, for that’s how it will come at you.” In truth, I think he wasn’t sure I had the strength; but saying this might give it to me.

When spring came in Yeola-e, of course, the war began to move again. Tinga-e fell, the warriors too starved to fight, and was sacked. When I read in the Pages that the streets had run ankle-deep in blood and a hundred thousand Yeolis had died, I had no way of knowing how much it exaggerated. But I could not doubt the city had been taken; and Arkan warriors encamped for a whole Yeoli winter will be vengeful.

I had killed three Yeolis when Norii came to speak with me the last time for the book. We’d become friends; I had told him my whole life story and everything on my mind, except for one thing; of all that, about an eighth was safe for him to write. I could tell when I went beyond the pale; he’d put his noteboard down.

“We’re done, then,” he said, as he was readying to go. He was the only Arkan I’d ever met from whom the Aitzas accent actually sounded refined and intelligent, showing how it was clearly meant to. I would miss him. “Unless you have any last thing to say?”

“I do,” I said. “Once I am free, I will return with an army and sack Arko.”

His pen froze in his hand, and he put down the noteboard, looked up and quirked his eyebrows, which were copious and yet narrow at once. “How do you expect to manage that?” he asked in that delicate accent, that had the weight of centuries of empire in it.

I smiled mysteriously and said, “You expect me to give away my plans?” So Life is Everything reads; in truth, I don’t remember the exchange. I do not doubt, though, that I thrust the noteboard into his hand and said, “Go ahead! Quote me, let all Arko know and be damned!” He did.

The title came from something I’d said when he’d asked me why I thought the Mezem was evil, and this killing we did, wrong: “Life is everything to the man I kill, just as life is everything to me,” or words to that effect. It came out after my forty-first fight, and he brought me a copy, and signed it with pen as if he’d scribed it, a custom for authors whose words are passed through the machine. I hadn’t thought he’d write like the others, but even so I was not prepared for what I read. His words, and my words in his hands, spoke my life here almost more clearly, it seemed, than I had lived it.

That same day, when my Mahid changed shifts, the two new ones cuffed me and led me by the elbows, not to the Marble Palace, but under the stands, where two more waited. They stripped me and did me as only Mahid unleashed, as they call it, can. Their leader was Second Amitzas, the head Mahid torturer; young Ilesias was one of the others. They had me for a good two beads.

I will say only that if one imagines a session of torture as a story, the main thread was that Amitzas had a serrated knife covered with the Lakan ointment of pain, azan akanaja, and orders to mark me with it once, to show the Imperator’s displeasure at my vow to sack Arko. The other Mahid had their sub-plots. One of them tore a bite-sized piece of flesh out of my back with his teeth, which even other Mahid find perverse; he got in trouble for it. I still have the scar, to show anyone who doesn’t believe this. It finished with Amitzas saying, “You will remember, every time you look in a mirror,” and slashing my right cheek from nose to jawline. The stuff started eating into my flesh instantly. They left me lying in the dust for Skorsas to find.

Iska took two beads on the wound, determined that I should be disfigured as little as he could help. I remember weeping when they lowered me into the bath, more in pleasure than pain. No surprise, the bite festered; that in itself kept me in bed and in half-waking nightmares, despite the sedatives, for three days.

By the number of times Skorsas said, “You will always be beautiful,” I knew my looks were ruined. I had never seen how I took them for granted; though I’d never thought myself as well-favored by the die as my father had been, I certainly had on occasion, as people do, looked into a mirror, posed and thought, “A fine figure this one cuts, yes, not bad at all.” Never again. I’d turn my head to see myself in profile from the uncut side, and wish I could enter rooms that way; or think, “On someone else, I’d think I’d say those eyes have seen too much.”

On the first day after, a note came with a very short poem, directing me to find things of mine in a certain place in the woods, signed, “Raven.” Skorsas went. It was my crystal and my father’s wisdom tooth, both of which the Mahid had torn off and thrown into the dust under the stands, and a lock of my hair, such as they’d all cut from my head as they left, for trophies.

I wasn’t in a state to notice, still raving, when Skorsas fastened the crystal and the tooth around my neck, but when I could, I thought: Ilesias. He did what was commanded, as he must; but wanted to give me some mercy. I had no use for a curl of my hair; he’d sent it just to show he’d taken it only for appearances. A Mahid by birth but not by nature, I thought, and then wondered how long he would last.

As for how the rest of the city took Life is Everything, my discontent came as a shock, of course. The tavern-master of the House of the Mountains accosted me in the colonnade after training a day or two later, and threw himself to his knees: apparently the mood of his place had turned so glum that his livelihood was threatened. He begged me to come and say something, anything, to cheer the miserable curly-black-wigged throng, apparently not noticing the ankle-shackles.

Hard on his heels came the king of the clan, a thin man with arms of straw whom one could tell was Arkan only by his blue eyes and his speaking; his hair and eyebrows he’d somehow made indistinguishable from mine, and he wore a vein-blood-red Yeoli-style shirt. His Karas Raikas pendant, the insignia of the fellowship, was golden; probably his life savings had gone to buy it.

The only name I had ever known him by was Freniraikas, which means “Child of Raikas.” I thought his heart would fail him, just from seeing me close; he was tongue-tied for so long I started feeling awkward myself. Finally he said what he had come to say: that if he could, he would free me, this on behalf of my true followers as well as himself.

From people who’d give their hair to see me fight, I thought, that means something. On a slip of paper I wrote my name in Yeoli. “Get this tattooed on your shoulder,” I said. “Then get those you know who truly would free me if they could to do the same. In the sack, my warriors will know by that, who loved me and believed in me.” His eyes bugged; then his face took on a glow, like those of people in Arkan paintings who’d been brushed by divine grace (odd-looking under black curls), as if he’d played a part in a legend that would be told for a thousand years.

Others thought I was a poor sport, throwing this pall on Arko’s love for me; in the Watcher, they called me cynical and small-minded, in the Pages ungrateful and a coward.

The rest of the city just took it as a stunning new turn of the script, and relished the heightening of the tragedy. I had wondered about Yeoli things becoming the rage in the city that was Yeola-e’s deadliest enemy; now it came to me why. Like Kurkas’s Tinga-eni wine, we were something to devour; it was whetting its appetite for us, savoring our delights, finding this new flavorful little morsel tasty. No wonder, I thought, Kurkas always licks his lips more at me than at his dinner, even when it comes from a breast.

Then Ilesias snuck to my window at night; I woke with the half-dreaming notion that it was Niku, and learned how desperately I missed her when I saw it was not. He told me that the one who’d bit me, whose name was Barbutas, had seen him pick up my crystal and tooth, which by Mahid measure would have been treason, and was blackmailing him. He needed a Yeoli crystal and a wisdom tooth, to prove he hadn’t returned them to me.

I was not willing to give up any of the wisdom teeth I had, so suggested he retrieve one from the lion-trench, which he did, though I learned later he could have gone one much more easily from a back alley in the poor quarter. The crystal he got from a jeweler—they were getting popular enough—and likewise a gold leaf like those in my hair, when Barbutas required that of him. I hoped that would be enough.

A few days later, I was in my room when the two Mahid changed shifts. The moment the relieved pair were gone, one of the fresh pair slid the bolts and said, as they always did, “Karas Raikas, you are required.” His voice seemed unusually young.

I opened the door. One of them was Ilesias; his face was Mahid stone, but his cheeks were pale, and even a stony pair of blue eyes can emanate terror. The other one was Barbutas, and what radiated from beneath the stone of his face was a eager smugness.

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