632 - The heart-slash of grief

The Assembly of Yeola-e should be told: “Down!”

Intharas Terren
The Pages of Arko, Risae 4, 54-to-last Y.P.A.

This morning, our beloved Imperator received a letter from his so-called masters in the Yeoli Assembly calling him to task for his expert handling of the slave revolt in Temono already covered elsewhere in these Pages. In fact, they are debating whether to command him—as by Yeoli law they have the right—to grant the ringleaders of the revolt full pardons and full freedom.

This quote, from our objective article on the matter elsewhere in these Pages, bears repeating:

“This would be an utter disaster,” says Sejetzas Orman Tenae, president of the Maintainers of Assets Sentient of Arko, whose members include all the major slave owners of the Empire and innumerable minor ones. “Were it to happen, the news would be followed by a wave of fire and barbarism across the Empire such as Arko has never seen. The cities would be awash in the blood of innocent Arkan citizens. We cannot overstate the danger. We adjure the Imperator to eschew such a command if it comes, if he has any concern for the people over whom he seized power.”

No doubt Shefenkas will furnish the explanation they are demanding of him by a characteristically-detailed envisioning of what would happen throughout the Empire were he to accede to such a command. But will it fall on deaf ears? The Assembly of Yeola-e has not shown a sterling history of concern for the fate of the Empire of Arko.

Or perhaps it’s a case of simple incompetence, laced with such stupidity as to barely seem human.

How dare these mealy-mouthed ministers of the mewling mob attempt to hold He Who May Not Be Contained on a dog’s leash, and how dare they so egregiously mock justice? These vile weaklings are not fit to dust the hallowed seats they seem to spend all their time wearing through whilst plotting our Imperator’s downfall.

This is by no means their first offense. In fact the insightful observer might detect something of a pattern. First, these bucolic bureaucrats bayed at him for supposedly seeking “excessive reverence” while he was still in the process of liberating them and their vile hanging tongues. Then it was for donning his sword in their hall just after announcing the results of the fodai to invade the Empire, which he did to cogently symbolize the brutality said decision would engender. They further hounded him with an initiative (eventually defeated) to establish a body to investigate his sanity with respect to his sacking the City (which most Yeolis favoured), humanely regretting sacking the City, and deciding to undergo the Ten Tens. Our most sacred ritual of all, the central ritual of all Arkan culture, these pants-sniffers took as grounds for accusations of insanity.

Shefen-kas may be a dyed-in-the-wool, so to speak, democrat, but he's a shining example of autocratic rule at its best. Each time the barking madmen dog his heels, he answers with infinite patience and carefully measured words, the same message: “You do not know Arko. I do. So leave it to me.”

So far sufficient shreds of sense sustain that he has made that message stick in his mountainous homeland. But how long can that hold?

On behalf of my fellow Arkans, I address the following to the august Assembly members, may they cease scratching their ears with their hind legs long enough to hear me—

No, the first words, of which there are two, of which the second is “off”, that spring to mind are not suitable for a respectable institution of news dissemination, so I will forbear. I will however say this:

“Down!”

And I adjure the Imperator—surely these moronic constraints must chafe, as the shackles on your wrists once did. You undertook to set us free; perhaps when the curs of mob-rule yap the loudest, you secretly yearn to set yourself free, too?

In Yeola-e, they probably pretend it is not possible, but anyone with any wit knows that it is: Shefenkas need only to refuse to hear the call, and there is nothing the Assembly of Yeola-e could do about it, other than slink away with its tail between its legs. Who can doubt the army he led to so many victories would stand with him, if it came to that?

So I implore the Imperator: should the representatives of your rabble choose to issue this odious command: for the sake of the economy and thus the life itself of the Empire of Arko, we beg you, refuse. Say “No!” and order them back to their kennels. In fact, it might be best for all concerned if you did that even if they do not so choose. We all would sleep better in our beds without this howling from the east.

This put Assembly, my sister told me in a letter, in an uproar. Intharas hadn’t separated out those who’d made or favoured the resolution, many Servants felt, so he’d impugned Assembly entire, calling all of them dogs. Not that that was what appalled them the most, she wrote. It was Intharas’s urging me to forsake Yeola-e, and rule Arko in my own right, even if Assembly didn’t command me to pardon the slaves of Temono. The short-chainers couldn’t believe he would write that unless I was behind it somehow, even if I had just happened to mention the idea. (I certainly never had to Intharas.)

What I did was write to Assembly unbidden, swearing that I had had nothing to do with the opinion except telling Intharas that I wouldn’t provide any quotes, and that I had no plans to go rogue. Several resolutions to censure me, demand things of me, truth-drug me and so forth were tried, but none went chalk. The Pages had proved sufficiently to Yeola-e that it was free of Imperial influence.

So they went after Intharas, but I tell out of order.

The heart-slash of grief for our stream-taken child slowly gave way to a slow bleed of worry for my wife. She began on a grief-bead, sitting in one of the open Marble Palace courtyards to carve, even in pouring rain. Everyone tried to speak to her. But she stayed a ghost in human flesh. I’d wake in the dead of night and find her sitting in the dark, like me before Kaninjer seized control of my nights. Worst sign of all: she didn’t go flying much. After a half-moon, I went to him.

He gave her something, and she took it, and then he gave her the same thing higher, and she refused to take another. Alchaen was building up a large clientele in Arko; his reputation for healing torture was made on having healed me of it, and of course there are plenty of people who have suffered it in and around the City. “You recall when your own feeling was locked up, why it was?” he said to me. I thought back, and remembered the sense of being the boy at the city-gates, holding back a horde beyond number of enemies outside with just my lone shoulder. “It’s the same with her. She’s afraid it will be huge beyond imagining and unending, if she allows even a crack.” But Niku would not go to him, saying only, “I’m not crazy.” He told me I’d just have to wait.

I kept wishing I could tell her that if there’s anything life has taught me, it’s to get over one agony as fast as possible so as to be ready for the next. About a moon after Roshten’s birth, Vriah got a throwing-up fever, and nothing Kaninjer could do seemed to keep her from getting sicker. There we’d been expecting to have three children, and now it looked as if they’d be cut down to one. Her weakening only seemed to stop when Kaninjer, not knowing what else to do, stopped giving her the medicine he was most often giving her.

He was stunned and baffled, but it crashed together in my mainland-trained mind. If you spend enough time with Haians, you pick up a little of their knowledge, especially if you find it fascinating, as I do. Their medicines never have only one use. The one he’d been giving Vriah, because it best matched the sickness she had, was the same one he often gave me, because it best matched my constitution. Neither I nor Krero had ever asked him how he kept his medicine-box secure.

He tested the bottle, somehow, and it was indeed slow-poisoned. An assassin who had infiltrated the Marble Palace and could read a Haian’s notes? “No, he’d only have to know his medicines,” said Kaninjer. “You’re not that hard to peg.” We never caught him. Kaninjer refined the poisoned bottle into its own antidote, got some of the original medicine unadulterated from another Haian in the city, and Vriah was soon on the mend.

The day we discovered the truth, Niku didn’t say a word, but just walked stiffly into a parlour off the main chamber, closing the door. Soon came the sounds of things caroming and smashing off the walls. Skorsas flinched at each crash, saying, “Those are priceless antiques!” Her voice took a little longer to find, but in time the cries came too. To me they were like rain in a desert. “But we’ve solved it, the child is going to be fine,” Kaninjer said to me helplessly. “Don’t worry,” I told him. “This is as much or more about the one the stream killed.”

When she came out, her eyes fixed on me like aimed arrowheads. She strode to me, grabbed me by the collar and banged me up against a pillar. “I don’t care if I’m a stranger to almost everyone there,” she hissed, her two fists hard under my chin. “You are going to arrange for me and the children you and I both love to live in Vae Arahi, and get us out of this stinking cesspit.”

“I surrender and beg mercy,” I said. “Good idea, love.” She had everyone ready to take off in the same time as it took me to write a pigeon note home to tell them to expect her, and they were gone before cliff-sunset.

Hat tip to Michael S.S. Thedford for role-playing Intharas and helping write the editorial.

Same day I posted this chapter I nominated capriox for a Rose & Bay Award for Best Patron, hence some of the comments below.