621 - A vagary of fate

10 Egis 4976 | City of Arko

Dear Mamin:

I am certain Klara wants me to ask her to marry me.

She has been well-nigh obsessive about Chevenga and Niku’s wedding… how beautiful it was, how gorgeous all the costumes were, how she sighed and wept all the way through. But then she keeps going on to say things like, “Oh, to have another wedding, even one much more humble!” and “When I think of weddings, I feel so full of love and yearning!” and “How I envy Niku, happily married now to the man of her dreams, who she loves with all her heart!”

But… how can a man marry a woman when he hasn’t even seen her breasts? This seems to be the expectation in Arko! They have no notion of sexual compatibility, because only the man is supposed to have pleasure. But how can she expect me to have pleasure if she’s not—or worse, if she’s having pain? How am I supposed to enjoy it if she, who I love, is enduring it?

I asked Skorsas about this. He said: “If you don’t love her enough to be willing to take the risk that the sex won’t be what you want, you don’t love her enough to marry her.”

I said, “But that’s crazy, when we could just try, test each other, even just examine each other, to find out whether we’d be making a terrible mistake.”

He said, “That is not the Arkan way, and she is an Arkan.”

Well, I am a Haian. Do my ways count for nothing? “You say it’s the Arkan way for the woman to have no pleasure, too, just bear children,” I said to him. “But I can’t imagine just pleasuring myself, and not her! Any more than Chevenga could imagine pleasuring himself with you, and not pleasuring you—can you see it that way?”

He glanced all around as if he was worried about spies, leaned in closer to me, and whispered, “Look, if you ever do pleasure her, once you’re properly married, do not go spouting it all over the Marble Palace or anywhere else. Yes, it happens. Yes, some men like it. But most people think a woman who has pleasure is a Masker in spirit, so if you don’t want the world thinking of your wife that way, keep your mouth shut.”

A Masker is a woman in Arko who lets men have sex with her for money. I don’t see what’s so terrible about that, but Arkans consider them the most sinful sinners. (The fact that the Fenjitza came out of a House of Masks, and Chevenga raises her beside him for rituals and so forth all the time, following ancient Arkan traditions, has somewhat turned their heads inside-out. But the prejudices are deeply-ingrained and won’t go away by tomorrow.)

“Mm, Kan, you’ve got your usual clueless look,” Skorsas said. “Just trust me—keep it quiet if you don’t want to hurt her very badly.” That was straightforward, so I said I’d remember and do so, and thanked him.

In Yeola-e, the closer the day of a crucial vote comes, the more the debate intensifies: the louder the arguments are made, the faster the arms wave. As in so many other ways, Arko is not the same. As the purification vote was a month, then three eight-days, then two eight-days, away, they seemed to go oddly silent, as if it had become a topic so searing that everyone was afraid of offending everyone else by mentioning it. Even the priests and the Voters Feminine went silent. The two Pages issues before the vote, you’d never have known it was happening, except for the instructions the Department of Fodai—newly-established as part of the Ministry of the Scales (which oversees justice and law-writing)—had printed in them.

Conducting a fair referendum in an Empire full of people who’ve never voted in any way in their lives, and many of whom are illiterate, takes an effort that would amaze most Yeolis. Two moons before we sent out heralds—duly guarded—to educate all citizens as to what a vote is, and then how to do it, demonstrating with the chips and the chalk and the charcoal, making sure they understood the question, and repeating over and over that for charcoal to win, it must not only exceed chalk but a quarter of the eligible voters.

Though the age of first voting in Yeola-e is sixteen—we feel that one who is old enough to lay down his life is old enough to have a say—in Arko we set it at the formal majority, third threshold or twenty-one. Women were as eligible than men, and foreigners living in Arko who either practiced the custom or had had it inflicted on them were also eligible, whether they were slave or free. (We wrote a law requiring slave-owners to allow their slaves both time and freedom of travel to vote.) Of course more questions came up: prisoners in jails? Lunatics? Senile elders? I went with what was tried and true to me, the Yeoli answers to these questions, and got yelled at on paper for it, of course.

In time for the day—Dimae 6, 54th-to-last (or 554th-to-last, for sticklers)Year—the newly-hired and trained vote clerks, counters, scriveners, count-couriers and guards (this was Arko) travelled out to every end of the Empire, with all their brand-new chips, chalk, charcoal, census and slave-survey lists of voters, booth-curtains, counting-forms and so forth. On the day, they set up the voting offices in town halls and temples and village squares, declared them open and waited for the people of Arko to come and declare their will.

In Yeola-e, any national vote day is a holiday, the feeling being that only one thing is important enough to do on that day. I hadn’t thought to require or even announce that in Arko, thinking they’d do it spontaneously, another of my Yeoli blindnesses. They didn’t; in the City it seemed to be business as usual everywhere, though the streets were perhaps a touch quieter. In the morning the people I’d sent out to observe reported back that hardly anyone was voting, and I hoped they were putting it off. During the dinner hour the vote-traffic picked up, but it was still a faint shadow of what you’d see in a big Yeoli city. By midnight, when they closed, I gathered about a fifth of those who could have voted had. Well, what did I expect? I asked myself. It’s the first attempt. At least it meant that if the rest of the Empire matched the city, purification was ended, for fourteen years at least.

Not till the vote was counted, though, could I make it official. It took three eight-days. I’d come to like working with a window open to the city, and on Dimae 7, I told myself I was imagining that the cries of the girls at noon were more numerous. On Dimae 8 they were more again, and kept increasing all through the time. Arkan parents were being less than scrupulous about the exact day of their daughters’ seventh birthdays, I realized, so as to get it done before the law came into force.

The final count was a slight charcoal, but only slight, about fifty-two in a hundred, to forty-eight. It was nowhere near a quarter, though, so I signed and declaimed the law on Dimae 30, announcing it myself from Presentation Balcony. The crowd below broke into keening and begging their respective Gods, “Have mercy on my daughter’s soul!” Not a protesting cry, at having their will denied, but a lament such as people make after a flood or an earthquake, a vagary of fate over which they have no control. The Imperator’s will had always been that, to them. They don’t get it, I thought. Yet, I told myself hard.

All Arkan laws come into effect at noon. As the bells pealed and the city fell silent, I leaned out the window. I heard wind, the rustling leaves of the surviving trees on Ineffable Street, the chirrup of the sparrows that haunt the Marble Palace roofs, the cooing of those most citified of birds, pigeons, the single bark of a dog before a person shushed him. I took it in with a deep breath, and felt as if a weight that I had not known was on my shoulders was lifted off, and shackles had been struck from my wrists. I will never hear the chimes of noon again.