182 - True power

As I picked five people to board the flagship with me, for caution, Krero said, “While you were chasing after that old snoot of a Speaking Elder, the Arkan ambassador showed up, wanting to know what was going on. Thinking perhaps we want to buy ourselves some time, I took the liberty of sending Evechera and Korai to the embassy to steal his pigeons. He went off that way in a hurry once he knew the situation, but they’ll have got there first, and I told them to take the birds back to our base in the House of Integrity. I hope you don’t mind.”

I’m the only patient of the House of Integrity who’s ever had a base there, I thought. “No, I don’t mind,” I said. “Good thinking.” Better than no pigeon message would be a false one, saying “Mission accomplished.”

We went aboard. The Mahid was indeed dead by arrows, three of them. There was a secretary and—of course—a cabin-boy, both hiding in the bunks until I coaxed them out.

I felt chills spread out from my heart as I read the order paper, signed and sealed by Kurkas’s own hand, as if that hand was touching me here. If they could not capture me after taking possession of Haiu Menshir, they were to arrest my healers and send them back to him.

Once we’d sent the false pigeon from the ship’s cages—I forged the note myself—and were coming off the ship, the Arkan ambassador came up the pier with surprising arrogance, considering. “You don’t think you’ve broken the World’s Compact enough, fighting and killing us here, you have to deny a legal embassy its means of communication as well?” he snapped at me in Enchian.

“Ser Ambassador,” I said, in one-down Arkan, “I have the mission orders here, but can barely believe what they say—would you care to read them yourself and confirm whether I have the Arkan correct?” I held the paper out so he could read, but didn’t let go, in case he had the notion of throwing it into the harbour to wash out the ink. His Aitzas-blue eyes widened a touch as he read, and were rather less arrogant when they met mine. “I’m going to show this to the Speaking Elder right now,” I said. “Would you care to accompany me?” Knowing she’d call him in anyway, he came, keeping a few paces away from me all the way.

Dinerer’s face, already stone-flat, went even flatter as I translated for her, and the ambassador confirmed. “Go,” she said to him. “I will speak to you again after we’ve held Council.” When he’d closed the door behind himself and his footsteps had faded, she turned her eyes to me. I wanted to say a thousand things, but knew it would be best to let her speak first.

“You predicted right,” she said finally. I couldn’t read the emotion. “You know them well. What do you think they will do now?”

“The moment they find out, they’ll be back with more ships and a stronger force,” I said. “And if they don’t find me, they’ll take my healers. Speaking Elder… if there is anything you wish of me, anything at all in my power as semanakraseye… we have privateers, a fair number of them. I can ask—”

She cut me off with a chop of her hand, as hard as a Haian can, which is still very soft. “Haiu Menshir will not be the next front in your war. There is but one thing I ask of you, Fourth Chivinga Shae-Arano-e. Heal.” And get your blood-drenched trouble-drawing self off my island. She didn’t need to say that for me to hear it.

“As soon as we finish with the Arkans, pack and secure our passage, we’ll be gone,” I said. The decision came as I said it.

“But… you still wear the green ribbon. I understood it is to be more than a month yet.”

“No. I asked Alchaen to heal me to the point at which I can command an army. I’m there now. I just proved it.”

Her eyes showed a mix of concern and relief. I don’t know that we have done due diligence, she was thinking, but I couldn’t see your hind end receding soon enough. “Well,” she said finally, “that’s between you and Alchaen.” She didn’t say whether all Haians would be withdrawn from Yeola-e, and I decided it was better not to ask.

If there is anything divine in the world, I said in my mind as I left her office, let it turn Kurkas’s mind onto me solely, and away from Haiu Menshir.

We split up the captured armour and weapons; we took most, since we could repaint it, but every sailor who’d been with us got a little something. We sent the surviving solas and other free Arkans off on the one ship, reducing its rowing crew by about half by freeing all those who were not Arkans. They took their dead, too, for burial at sea, an honourable funeral in the Arkan navy. Weaponless, they hoisted the ivy-branch flag, but my privateer captain had a bit of a gleam in her eye. “No,” I said. “They surrendered on my promise to spare them. Besides, we might ask passage with you, say, tomorrow, if you are willing.” She agreed, of course. I never learned what became of those Arkans.

The Haian crowd was slowly dispersing, though they kept glancing over their shoulders as if violence might break out again any moment. “To the Yeoli embassy,” I ordered all of mine except Salao, who’d been carried to University Hospital. “We’re not going to pass through the gate again with weapons; we’re going to store them there instead. Arko’s not going to be back before we’re gone.”

“Cheng, it’s a month and a quarter,” Krero said. “Sure, they don’t have pigeons, but one of their embassy staff is going to get on the fastest ship to Fispur he can.”

“We’re going to be gone tomorrow,” I said.

There was a check in everyone’s step. “Tomorrow?” several people said. “But…” A few cast meaningful glances at the green ribbon.

I turned, halting them. “Look. I came here to become able to command an army again. Do any of you doubt I can do that now?” The smiles of victory came back, erasing the worry, and one or two laughed and said “Fair enough.”

Alchaen was walking with us. When we’d washed and marigold-creamed our cuts and changed, he asked to speak with me, in my leaf-house. “My Yeoli is rudimentary,” he said. “But I thought I caught something, correct me if I’m wrong. You want to leave soon?” I signed chalk. “But you aren’t ready.”

Of course, you are going to be the hardest to convince. I made my argument again. “May we walk on the beach?” he said. While weapons are forbidden on Haiu Menshir, drink is merely abstained from, not forbidden; I’d noticed a fair number of jugs appearing out of nowhere in my people’s hands on the way back to the House of Integrity, and even though it was only afternoon, voices were beginning to get louder. Promising them I’d be back soon, I went with him.

“If your state when you came here is one, and fully healed is ten,” he said, “I’d say you are at about... seven. It’s not enough, Chivinga.” He’s skewing it low to persuade me, I thought. “There are… any number of things that might happen, that you wouldn’t be able to handle.”

“What, such as Arkans attacking? I can handle that; I just did. What am I going to face in the war that’s worse than that?”

He pursed his lips. I worried at the edge of a nail where I hadn’t got all the blood out, until I noticed him seeing it. “I don’t know,” he said. “But I know that I have not told you the worst thing, though. I’ve been waiting until you seemed ready.”

A sliver of cold and sickness crept down through my centre. It’s the part of me that knows what it is, I thought. “Tell me,” I said. “Surely I seem ready now.”

He heaved a sigh, in the closed-mouth way that Haians do it, and resolve came into his eyes. I could guess his logic. If Chivinga takes it well, his point is proven and he is right. If it flattens him, my point is proven and he will stay. “Give me your hands and breathe deeply,” he said. All-Spirit, I intoned inwardly. Strength.

“Remember that they told you that Yeola-e was defeated,” he said. “That wasn’t everything.” I swallowed, my mouth suddenly dry, and felt something start lashing me on the inside, rhythmically, like a whip. “It was Kurkas himself, who spoke to you. He told you your name had been erased from all records, and was now against the law to speak in Yeola-e and Arko both, and that you would be forgotten as if you’d never lived, except perhaps as Karas Raikas, and by him. He would keep you secretly as his mind-broken play-toy, until the eve of your thirtieth birthday, and then have you put down, but preserve your corpse, to be buried with the head under his feet when he himself was buried.”

So well I knew the feeling of the hidden darkness rising, the clawing from the pit of my soul, the fear-sweat, scalding and freezing at once.

“He said to you”—Alchaen’s hands tightened on mine. “He said, ‘Cease fighting, and it will cease hurting. Let your mind die.’”

I opened my mouth to let out a wordless scream, and released only silence. No! No, All-Spirit, no! I didn’t! Tell me I didn’t! All-Spirit help me, Alchaen help me, tell me I didn’t! What was I if I had given myself up, if I had chosen this?

“The ultimate lesson,” Alchaen said gently, his hands tight around mine. “Learn this, and you will not only be sane, but wiser. And don’t think yourself weak for it. It would be the same with anyone. The torturer never wreaks the worst on us; expert torturers, such as these, know that. We wreak it on ourselves.”

†

“Yet what Kurkas did to you,” he said, when I’d come to myself enough to know I was lying on his lap on the sand, twitching, “even a Mahid could think beyond the pale.” Amitzas, I thought. The Imperial Pharmacist. Somehow, somewhere in me, I knew. “He came in after Kurkas was gone, and looked at you lying on the table. We cannot know what he thought, but what he did was lay his hand on your forehead, then cradle your head in his arms. When you wept, he did not punish you. You understand why they trained you not to cry out or weep—because feeling denied expression turns inward, where it wreaks worse suffering... What he did drew you back from the brink.”

“Then… I…” Every word was a boulder I pushed up a mountain. “did… not… save… myself… He… did.”

“Think of it this way, Chivinga. He was moved to do it. Even helpless, wordless, on the table, something in you drew him to do it. That is to his credit, but is it not also to yours?”

The idea of answering was too daunting. I closed my eyes, then heard the voice of the harmonic singer and the wind. It was the first time I had heard it since before this thing that had torn my life in two. Understanding unfolds, like the opening of a rose, petal by petal. I saw another petal turned back, about the thing I must understand the most.

“Power is not a trait,” my grandmother had taught me. “It is an agreement. No one person has it, because you can’t have it alone.” I’d understood the skeleton of this. Now I got the whole.

That I had not had the strength to save myself didn’t matter. While my people were with me, I need never stand alone. For an instant, First Amitzas Mahid, whatever he intended, had been one of my people. “True power comes only from the love of the people,” the ancient philosopher wrote. Now I truly knew what that meant.

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