565 - His mother as in a dream

With any luck, Vaneesh would end up with two more children by my doing. There was the child we were trying to conceive, and there was her son who’d been kidnapped by Arkans. He’d been eight at the time, old enough to remember his free life, even if it must be with the aid of healing because of whatever his owners had done to him. He’d been taken eleven years ago, making him almost a man at nineteen.

We had already started the search in the wake of my army, with Roskatis combing through the newly-captured Arkan lands west of Roskat. They’d turned up nothing, and so we knew that the Arkans had done what they sometimes do: move slaves very far away from home, so the length and the danger of the journey they’d have to undertake to escape will make them give up the idea of trying. He could be anywhere in Arko.

I was thinking about the difficulties of it—hiring bureaucrats to comb through slave-records, sending off search parties to distant towns—when I saw a simple solution: just order all Roskati slaves in Arko freed. It is a small country, so there couldn’t be enough of them to starve Arko by leaving farmwork undone. I had almost put the golden pen to the paper when it occurred to me that if I freed all Roskati slaves immediately, I would have to do the same with all the other allies. (They’d clamoured for it as we were making our various deals, and I’d had to swear that it would happen whatever our agreement was, just not immediately. Some had gained back people by exchanging them for Arkan slaves in lands they’d been granted under the agreement, but the majority still remained in Arko.

There were so many peoples among them that Arko could afford to lose the slaves of any one of them; but what would happen if it were all of them at once? I didn’t know, actually; Arkans don’t deign to count slaves when they do a census. A man must report every five years to the Ministry Pecuniary how many slaves he owns, because he is required to pay an annual tax for each one, but to find out the total, one would have to copy it from every tax record to add up. I could order the next census to include slaves, but since it was the 50th-to-last year (a multiple of five) there had just been one, and censuses are every five years, too. I wanted to move on abolishing slavery well before that.

“What you can do is an Empire-wide inventory of slaves,” Amanas suggested, when I kicked it over with him. “Require all slave owners to send in a report, with name, town of origin, date of birth and year purchased, and say you will randomly truth-drug some of them for confirmation… because they know you want to free the foreigners especially, so they’ll be inclined to hide that they have them.”

A way to incline them the other way came to me, on a little thought. “I could announce that I’m going to abolish slavery all at once on such-and-such date. In the screams of protest, I will hear, ‘But you can’t do that! You’ll beggar the Empire!’ and I can answer, ‘Will I? I don’t know that… prove it to me, how many slaves are there?’”

He stared at me for a bit, then said, “The Gods only know what Arko did to offend Them so hugely that They set you against us.” It had his stamp of approval as a good idea, then, so I enacted it. Not quite so baldly as an open announcement; I just said it to enough Arkans to get the rumour running through the city. Then of course the Pages was asking, so I had to say that I was considering it but was open to opinions. “I must learn exactly how much havoc in Arkan commerce it will wreak,” I told and was quoted to say by Intharas. “I guess we’d better do an inventory.”

You might have guessed, I am telling shamefully out of order. I enacted it perhaps two moons after doing the Ten Tens, and—even though some decried it as a trick, saying my real plan was to have the biggest slave-owners arrested and executed—it was completed quite quickly. What I learned from it, in a nutshell, was that the abolition of slavery would indeed have to be done stepwise, and carefully. I announced this, to great relief.

In the meantime, I had the statisticians at the Numerous Directorate (the branch of the Ministry of Posterity that runs censuses) add it up all manner of ways: how many slaves of each race, where they were, how many chains their work was worth, how many chains it cost to maintain them, and so forth. It also did include town of origin and age, so I had them separate out any records that mentioned Roskatis and turn them over to one Arkan-reading Roskati clerk, sent by Mirko for the purpose, who looked for nineteen-year-old males from the city of Roskat purchased eleven or fewer years ago. When he found one he’d write a letter asking for a description of the youth, and if it was a match to what Vaneesh remembered, she’d pay a visit.

Where we found him, I could have got to in a tenth, on foot and the Lefaetas Pastaias, from my office. He was owned by the fessas Cemetery Lakrimae, where he worked as a grave-digger and pulpit-setter. Arkan burial grounds are circular, with a priest’s pulpit in the middle which rotates on its base, so it can precisely face the grave being filled for the funeral ceremony. The highest-ranked families are buried closest to it and the lowest furthest away, of course.

Savruko, as that was his true name, did still remember his language rustily, his home distantly, and his mother as in a dream. Being a serene rather than rebellious soul—no surprise there, his eyes were his mother’s, perfectly—he’d avoided the worst of slave-mistreatment, and so seemed only humble, not badly broken. Also no surprise, he was fey, feeling the spirits of the dead all the time, and even seeing them sometimes; that tends to give one perspective in adversity.

He had not absconded during the sack out of a sense of responsibility; “I knew there would be much call for my work,” he told us, in hesitant Roskati which Vaneesh interpreted for me. “I did not sleep for three days, and even so… well, all did not get the proper rites.”

“My fault,” I said. “I ask Arkans this and you are not Arkan, but you’ve been here eleven years: did you lose anyone?”

“A few friends,” he said, then went on with his story without judgment of me. “I’ve stayed since because… well, I have no other skill.”

“Your choices are many,” his mother said. “But first you need to go home, and learn again who you are for a time.” When they were in my presence, they were never not touching each other, even if it was just holding hands, as if to make up for all the loving touch they’d been denied.

He did that, and eventually felt the call into the priesthood. I got a tentatively-joyful letter instead of a visit from her the next scheduled time, saying, “I am with child; I will inform you if I remain so.” She had a tendency to miscarry, on top of all those she’d lost. After three moons, however, she was still with child, past the time of worst danger.