161 - Only by being the other

Towards the end of his reign, the Living Greatest makes peace with his fate

By Roras Jaenenem : Watcher of the Ring, Aras 1, 57^th-to-last Year of the Present Age

Going into his last five fights before his liberation—if he wins all of them, which seems overwhelmingly likely—the raven-haired enfant terrible of the Mezem has undergone a surprising change.

Lightning Loner, it seems, has freed himself of the austere Yeoli custom forbidding the wearing of any finery made of any metal, base or precious, now constantly sporting a spectacular pair of gold bracelets that mimic his Yeoli warrior’s wristlets, and a sparkling of golden finger-rings on his naked black-furred hands.

He’s begun dressing as his boy and aspiring couturier Skorsas Trinisas wanted him to at the start, donning previously unused scarlet, black and gold outfits that magnificently push the edge of fashion and decency. An unnamed source within the Fighter’s Quarters says, “There’s half a wardrobe full that he’s never touched before. Skorsas actually doesn’t like it; he’s saying, ‘I thought these things were him, but now I really know him, they’re not.’” The formerly-modest fighter, though, has apparently decided that they are.

He’s loosened up in the area of vices, regularly drinking a cup of wine with meals and even indulging in that most decadently-unYeoli of failings, Arkanherb, now and then.

But most striking to the faithful scribes of the Ultimate Sport, Loner, who made it an iron-clad rule never to let a single quotable word to us pass his lips for his first forty-four fights, has suddenly become downright talkative.

Friendly would be too generous a term. Often he excoriates persons who may not be excoriated in these, or any, pages, with a wit as sharp as his ancient sword, but unquotably. Other times, he recounts tales of the Mezem and elsewhere, which often as not turn out to be, shall we say, exaggerated. Now and then it’s a lecture on strategy and tactics; occasionally he simply indulges in flights of plays on words, sometimes bilingually. Those who ask him a serious question (for example, “Why the change of heart?”) are always in danger of an absurd answer (“I went to the temple—yes, in chains, of course—and the light of the glory of Celestialis fell over me. I’ve felt nothing but love in my heart for you all ever since.”)

The Director is delighted. “It was always painful to my heart that Loner, now the Ring’s most precious man, seemed ill-at-ease here,” he says. “But I think he has finally settled the war in his own heart, and settled into his good fortune. I am pleased beyond pleased. What makes him happy makes me, and all of us, happy.”

“Skorsas says my clothes are not me?” says the reformed Loner, with arched brows and a quirking grin. “What is me is whatever I want. I am a thousand things. Here in the palace of death, I am grateful, loving death for one thing: it is an inexhaustible source of jokes.” He lets out a laugh.

†

I thought and dreamed as well as spoke in Arkan, and it seemed to me I could no longer speak any Yeoli but “Hold still while I brand you.” I didn’t decide any of these things, I recall, in fact I barely noticed them, aside from admiring the flash of my finger-rings, or laughing hysterically when I thought, “Hear ye, hear ye, Servants of Buzzard Assembly: he’s down, spare or kill, white or red, chalk or charcoal? Semana kra.” I decided nothing; it was more as if it slowly dawned on me that it was much easier to let the current carry me than swim upstream.

I made forty-five fights, and began to see things in my food, as Jinai had predicted, jam with worms squirming in it, maggots crawling out of the sauce to the edge of my plate. I killed more Yeolis; my fifth to second-last fights were all Yeolis. I said to Iska, “I’m mad, I know,” and it ceased bothering me. I donated money to the orphanages, wanting to do it anonymously, but Skorsas insisted on loudly announcing the Karas Raikas Beneficent Fund.

I made forty-six, and as I was coming out of the shower he said Celestialin, as if it were my name. I said, sorry? He answered, Celestialin is the divine hero of Arkan myth, who will save Arko on its day of deepest peril. It had come to him in a flash like the sun’s blinding light that I must be him. Save Arko, you’ve got to be joking, I said. I’m the last person in the world who’d be him. I will destroy Arko, if anything. Besides, how can Celestialin be Yeoli? But he was quite serious; he’d hired a scholar to check through the Book, the Arkan work they claim is the Gods’ word, and never does it explicitly say Celestialin is Arkan. It does explicitly say that the Chosen One will deny vociferously that he is the Chosen One, so that didn’t get me off.

Perhaps Arko can only be saved by a taste of fire and a bath of blood, purification, he said. You are too perfect not to be divine.

As the Mahid are trying to teach me, I thought, their will is mine; I belong in their hands, under them. Shininao came to me in my dreams.

He was big, big enough for his leather and steel wings, the ribs curved like sword-blades, to enwrap my nakedness, strong beyond imagining, to cradle my weight on onyxine gossamer. His eyes were blue and his beak had the mouth of a woman on the end, a kiss like warm roses, a long wet binding tongue. “I give myself to you,” I told him, throwing my head to the side, to open up my right ear. “We’ve always been close; let’s consummate it.” We made our pillow-talk, our jokes. I always had to remember to thank him while I could still speak, to kiss his talon for making it so merciful. It was ecstasy beyond ecstasy, the beak pressing deep into my ear, slow as a healer’s probe, his tongue sliding tenderly in through my every vein, to freeze my heart in his warmth; that would kill the grium, robbing it of its nourishment, and tear away all my cares; I could feel them smooth off my face, as the peace of stillness filled me. No matter that I was in a crypt, stuffed unburned like an Arkan into this great gaudy stone place that had eaten so many; no matter the thousand blood-dripping ghosts seeping from the walls. I threw my arms wide and came and came and came.

I made forty-seven, and read of the Arkans advancing north towards Vae Arahi. The people wills, Cheng, Mana kept saying to me, when he could. The people wills, we need you, hang on, Cheng, hang on. In the same tone, leaves rustle in courtyards. I’ll hang on like Chinisenga, I joked, but it fell flat. Celestialin, you must live to save us, said Skorsas. By ‘us,’ he meant Arkans.

I made forty-eight, and to my amazement and delight, Kurkas invited me up for dinner; in fact he honored me, entrusting me to join him in his sanctum, so many of the Empire’s greatest treasures laid out before me. There are no guards there, no spring-darts.

Once we were sitting I sprang up, and jammed a gold-leafed chair up under the doorknob. To strike him speechless I raised Sibbas’s Flying Machine in my hands, and flung it straight up against the ceiling, to smash into a rain of shards. It worked; he sat as white-faced and glass-eyed as the dead.

“It is the truth of life,” I said, as I crushed the three bird’s eggs under my heel, “that all one has can be destroyed. Those you have trusted will betray you, kill those you love, try to tear down what you are, in the deepest sense. I have learned that; you have not; you will now. I call you out: be me, Kurkas Aan, be the world that your hands touch so much, and know what they do.

“Your home will be sacked,” I said, as I drew the antique sword and slashed the paintings, “all your possessions ruined, all your slaves… ‘ I drew the bird out of its cage, screeching and flapping, by the neck, let him think for a while I meant to kill it, then thrust it out the window, and let it fly. “…freed!”

“It will die out there,” he said, in an ashen, stupid voice.

“As the old saying goes,” I said, “if it comes back, it is yours.” I have never known joy until now, I thought, shattering a row of glass figurines with one sweep of my foot, while with my hand I held his childhood drawing of a winged lion in the candle-flame. The euphoria of destruction is giddy, wild, intoxicating like a drug; its sweetness increases with the value of the things destroyed. Some warrior-turned-philosopher once said this comes in truth of the delight in throwing off the bounds of the material, in freedom, however short-lived, from the rule that everything has a cost. Perhaps; I’d thrown off all other bounds.

I remember how the miniature Hero looked with his head, then without, just a pair of godlike shoulders, while the great jawbone in my hands tingled with the stroke, and my laughter filled the air. “All you have created, burned; all you have thought inviolate, violated, all you have collected…” I paused before The Delights of Celestialis, decided I liked it, unhooked it and stood it by the door to take away later. “…looted!” With the bone shouldered, I stood over the glass city of Arko. Those blue porcelain eyes poured out silent tears now, like cracked dishes leaking, though still enthralled by horror, and disbelief of a horror so great, like the eyes of people watching a massacre.

“You who have wanted to possess me,” I said, “know nothing of me, as you are learning now. You who have such power, know nothing of power; that too, you will learn now. It’s only by being the other, what we call chiravesa, one truly can.” I raised the bone in two hands. “This is power.” He froze deeper still. “Beg me not to, Kurkas.”

His voice came out a rasping scrape. “What I will do to you for this, barbarian, what I will do to you…”

“Don’t threaten—beg! Threats won’t touch me; I am free. Threats are for the future; only this moment is now, and we are only here, now. There’s only one thing you can do: beg me.”

With a clarity like a child’s, he spoke his heart. “Shefen-kas. I don’t know how.”

“Too bad, then!” A sweet tinkling crash, the tiny glass Avenue of Statuary made. He screamed, as if I’d run him through the stomach. “And one day,” I shouted over the din, “this will be the fate of the real Arko!” Three quick hammer-blows, and the Mezem, the Marble Palace and the University were shards and glass-dust. “Hear me, All-spirit! Hear me, you Arkan gods who might be lurking around to listen, with your dog mother! I who know true power have spoken: so it will be, for the real city of Arko, for so I shall make it! Arko will die in flame and blood, will bend to the dust and have its face ground, will kneel to serve the world as it would have had the world serve it! Arko will die, and history will forever remember Kurkas Aan as the Imperator who failed to save it, and Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e as the conqueror who destroyed it! Hear me, all the world! I will kill Arko!” I left not so much as a miniature glass tying-post in one piece, eventually tossing aside the bone and doing it with my hands, though they were soon red with glass-cuts; I felt no pain. He threw his head back and screamed with abandon.

When I was tired enough to be satisfied, which because of my Mezem training was a long time, I tucked the painting under my arm and left him howling on the floor, his arms reaching for the shards and ashes and shreds as if by pure wish and tenderness he could repair them. No guards had come, for he had never called them; no one in authority must have been within earshot, and those who were near, too stunned to seek such a person, for I strolled with the painting out of the Palace and to the Mezem unhindered. In my room I hung it; from then on all who entered complimented me on having acquired such a faithful reproduction.

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